JACKSON, Miss. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Friday visited the home of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi’s capital, later saying that transportation is important to ensuring equity and justice in the United States.
“Disparities in access to transportation affect everything else – education, economic opportunity, quality of life, safety,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg spent Thursday and Friday in Mississippi, his first trip to the state, to promote projects that are receiving money from a 2021 federal infrastructure bill. One of them is a planned $20 million improvement on Medgar Evers Boulevard in Jackson , which is a section of US Highway 49.
Evers’ daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, talked to Buttigieg about growing up in the modest one-story house her family moved to in 1956 — about how she and her older brother would put on clean white socks and slide around on the hardwood floors afterward. their mother, Myrlie, waxed them.
It’s the same house where Myrlie Evers spoke with her husband, the leader of the Mississippi NAACP, about the work he was doing to register black voters and challenge the state’s strictly segregated society.
Medgar Evers had just arrived home in the early hours of June 12, 1963, when a white supremacist shot him dead, hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech about civil rights.
After visiting the Evers home, Buttigieg spoke about the recent anniversary of the assassination. He also noted that Friday marked 60 years since Ku Klux Klansmen ambushed and killed three civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman — in Neshoba County, Mississippi, while investigating the burning of a black church.
“As we carry the moral weight of our heritage, it seems a little strange to talk about street lighting, ports, highway funding and some of the other everyday transportation needs we are here to do something about.” Buttigieg said.
However, he said equitable transportation has always been “one of the most important battlegrounds in the fight for racial and economic justice and civil rights in this country.”
Buttigieg said Evers called for a boycott of gas stations that did not allow black customers to use their bathrooms, and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who visited sites in his Mississippi district with Buttigieg, said the majority-black city of Jackson has been “left out of so many funding opportunities” for years while money to expand roads has gone to wealthier suburbs. He called the $20 million a “down payment” for future funding.
“This initial payment will address some of the problems associated with years of neglect – potholes, businesses that have closed because there is no traffic,” Thompson said.
Thompson is the only Democrat representing Mississippi in Congress and the only member of the state’s U.S. House delegation who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill. Buttigieg also said that Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker voted for the bill.
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