Race, Transportation and Opportunity
On September 25, 2014, I awarded $25 million to the City of Detroit to purchase new buses as U.S. Transportation Secretary. Nearly half of the existing bus fleet was in disrepair. Many hard-working people depended on this system, and its reliability could make the difference between getting a job, an education or necessary medical care for so many. While the speech focused on transportation, I took the opportunity to speak about racial injustice as well. This speech took place six weeks after the police shooting of Michael Brown and mass protests in Ferguson, MO.
My grandfather was a principal of black high schools in segregated North Carolina back in the fifties and sixties.
And back then, a principal of a black school in rural North Carolina was not just the principal. If the math teacher got sick, you were the math teacher that day. If the janitor did not feel well, you cleaned up that day. You did any job necessary to ensure your students had a chance to beat the odds.
All this is to say: Growing up, I had some sense that my grandfather helped lift kids up –lift them up in a world that worked to hold them back. Sometimes with hand me down books and school uniforms. Sometimes with substandard housing. Sometimes with a billy club or a fire hose.
So, I had an idea of what my grandfather had done — that he work required deep commitment. But I really didn’t understand the full extent of it until after he was gone, until after I met someone while first running for mayor of Charlotte.
During my campaign, a man approached me and said that my grandfather had made a real difference in his life. I was the grandchild of educators, and such testimonies, while heartwarming, happened from time-to-time.
Sensing that I did not understand the force of his experience, he explained that, as a high school student having no family members who attended college, my grandfather encouraged him and even helped him fill out his college applications. I had known my grandfather to do such things.
But he went further. No one in his family knew how to fill out college loan applications, so my grandfather had helped him do so as well. He went still further. When the forms needed to be transported three hours away in Raleigh, North Carolina, my grandfather gave the young man the keys to his car.
The man shook my hand and explained, “Without your grandfather, I never would have become a surgeon
By his actions, my grandfather was saying to that young man, “Don’t stop. Keep going.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, about our kids. How could you not?
It’s been about six weeks since we saw anger spilling over in Ferguson, Missouri at death of a young black man, Michael Brown. This follows the very public tragedy of Trayvon Martin.
I haven’t commented about this issue publicly as Secretary of Transportation. In the raw moments following Michael Brown’s shooting, clearly the issue most front and center was — and is — the criminal justice system.
I can recall a time in my life when I was pulled over by the police. I was afraid. And perhaps I was unprepared to deal with a hostile police officer. And without knowing it, my own demeanor provoked his reaction. I was lucky enough not to have been victimized. But the experienced was seared into my mind. I understand where folks are coming from when they demand fairness, demand justice.
And I believe our justice system will work its course. Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is a fierce defender of civil rights — and his department will do all he can.
But that said, as I think about the incidents of outrage in my lifetime — LA in ’92, or St. Petersburg in ’96, or Ferguson in 2014 — what’s always lingered in my mind is that there is more than just the workings of the criminal justice system at issue.
The anger people feel in those moments is concentrated anger. It is full of other slights, hardships, and unnecessary challenges that people experience:
It’s about the woman, here in Detroit, who wants to get a better job… but has no way to even get TO one. Because there’s no transit.
It’s about the homeless vet in Philly who has slept every night on the street for the past two decades.
It’s about the black family that wants to move into a better area, but a real estate agent won’t show them a house there because he’s deemed it a “white’s only neighborhood.”
Or a single mother in Atlanta who has to wait hours with her three kids for the bus home — and when the bus finally drops them off, it does so on the other side of highway. And she has to shepherd her kids across all 5 lanes to get home.
These are real people. Often they don’t ask for much, except for someone to give them just a little help… to toss them a set of car keys… to tell them, “Keep going.”
I will tell you their stories today.
Because the thing everyone in this country has to understand is this: After tragedies like the one in Ferguson, the conversation gets so heated… that often we forget that there’s another conversation we have to have:
It’s not just about what happened in the street on THAT day, but what happens on those streets EVERY DAY.
THE SYSTEMIC CRISIS
You know what’s happening in our communities.
Now — and for the last 40 years, in fact — the black unemployment rate has almost constantly stayed 60 percent higher than the white unemployment rate.
Walk into any classroom of poor fourth-graders in this country; eighty percent of them wouldn’t be able read at grade level.
Today, there are more black men in locked jail today than there were bound in slavery on the eve of the Civil War.
In California, New York, Washington, DC: Even if a worker making the minimum wage slept only 6 hours a night… worked the rest of the time, all seven days in the week… and saved no money for anything other than rent… she still wouldn’t be able to afford a basic two-bedroom apartment.
And for every one person who passes through this transit station today,… tonight in Detroit, there will be two more people — most likely black — who will sleep in a place like this… or on the street… or in a shelter. This city’s homeless population — 20,000 — could fill its own town.
History, it’s said, is a living thing. But it’s also true that we live our history.
As troubled as some streets in Detroit are now, seventy years ago the streets here were filled with smoke and screaming. Detroit, back then, was the center of production for World War II. Jeeps were made here. Tanks were made here. And the workers to make them came from across the country — and were of every race.
And for some people, that was a problem. White folks picketed the apartment buildings as black folks tried to move in; at the Packard plant, where aircraft engines were built, white employees walked off the line when black employees were sent to work side-by-side with them.
One man put his lips to a bullhorn — and yelled, “I’d rather let Hitler win than work next to a nigger.”
THE ADMINISTRATION’S WORK.
This legacy of injustice is why I’m here; why I wanted to be Secretary of Transportation.
Because just over a year ago, I was nearly done with my second term as mayor of Charlotte. And I was thinking about what I should do with my career.
And I saw what the President’s administration was doing.
I read about Shaun Donovan, the housing secretary — about how he went to Philadelphia and walked into the apartment of a 59-year-old black man. The man’s name was Winfred Surrency. He was a former Marine, a trumpet player like me, and had, on at least one occasion, helped his community: he stopped a robbery at a Starbucks.
But Winfred, who’d once been an addict but was no longer, had also spent the last twenty years living in appliances boxes on the street.
He had landed the apartment with the help of a federal program. And Secretary Donovan walked into his living room to say the administration was setting aside $60 million dollars to help homeless veterans in the same way — and to call Winfred “a symbol of hope.”
I heard how Secretary Donovan — and our housing department — and helped a woman who was living in the projects. She had to use her son’s bedroom for a kitchen, because mice had taken over the actual kitchen. So she decided to get out, to look for a new home.
But when she went to a real estate agent, and told him where she wanted to look for houses, he wouldn’t show them to her. He told her, quote. “When white people see black people in their neighborhoods, they get offended.”
So, she went to HUD — and their fair housing department — and they made sure if she could afford the house, she could buy it. That’s the power needed to take on a systemic unfairness. It requires effort, intention and relentless but it can be done.
I saw the Department of Education push to give all children, no matter what zip code they were from, access to pre-school.
And I saw, in our President, someone who would rally a country’s-worth of mentors around our young men — and guide them to life of purpose. And that’s what he’s been doing with his My Brother’s Keeper Initiative.
And so when the president called me a little over a year ago, and asked me to be his Secretary of Transportation, I said, “Yes.”
Because I saw it as a chance to do what others in government are doing: to weaken that legacy of racism; to create an opportunity for someone who — while maybe not living in appliance boxes — had never really had a shot a better job or school or house before.
OUR WORK AT DOT
When it comes to transportation, pick a city in America and look at its highways — and where those highways lead to. Better yet, look where they’ve been cut through.
Go see Syracuse, New York, there’s a 1.4-mile stretch of highway known as the “viaduct.”
When it was built about a half-century ago, it was constructed right through the middle of a predominantly African-American neighborhood, cutting them off from economic development — places as basic as a grocery store.
The founder of the local chapter of the NAACP actually called the highway “the Berlin Wall” — something that separates the haves from the have nots.
You can look there. Or you can go look in this city, at Woodward Avenue. Sixty percent of the people Detroit don’t have access to a car. But Woodward Avenue is corridor that’s home to 40 percent of the jobs in the city — and really the only way to reach it is by car!
So transportation isn’t just about a way there; it’s about a way UP. And without it, it’s hard to imagine just how hard life can be.
Four years ago in Atlanta, Raquel Nelson was taking the bus home with her three children. She had taken them grocery shopping at Wal-Mart and missed their transfer bus on the way home, which meant that she and the three kids — ages nine, four, and three — had to wait an hour and a-half for the next bus.
When they finally boarded — and, then, got to their stop — the bus dropped them off on the other side of the street, which they had to cross to get home. It was a 5-lane highway.
Raquel lost control of her four-year-old, who was struck and killed. And she was charged — and convicted — of vehicular homicide.
These are the stories I think about — and the questions they raise:
What good is a transportation system… if folks can’t even walk home safely?
Rosa Parks — the namesake of this station — sat down on a bus for freedom. And now, nobody has to sit at the back of the bus anymore. But what good is that, if the bus doesn’t stop where you need it? Or if the bus doesn’t come at all?
I don’t want to ask those questions anymore.
So we’re making an effort at DOT — an effort so that our transportation system works for everybody, even if you are poor.
It’s why I was here in Detroit just last week, talking about the Woodward Corridor — the one that’s only accessible by car. But not for long thought. Because we just invested the last dollars Detroit needs to start work on Woodward’s new streetcar — the M-1 rail project.
This is why I’m here again, too: Because, today, I can announce that DOT and President Obama are granting Detroit $25 million so the city can purchase 50 new buses.
For the first time, parts of this city will have access to transit that never have before. Or if there was transit, the buses were often very late and packed people in like sardines.
This we’re doing across the country: We’re helping build bridges in rural Mississippi… a transit stop in Boston… and more bus routes in Richmond and Omaha.
CONCLUSION
So don’t say: this administration isn’t making progress.
Government may not be able to end poverty entirely. It can’t cure racism by itself.
But here’s what it can do: It can look at those people who are working really hard… who are riding the bus for hours to get to work… who are pouring their heart into a new business, but aren’t sure if the customers will be able to reach it… and it can grab those people by the shoulder and say, “Keep going.”
I can’t give my car keys to every bright student in this country or to every hard working person who just needs access to the opportunity. But I will use every bit of the authority I possess to open that door as wide as possible for as many as possible.
Good people of Detroit, this is a big step not only for you but for our country. We’re giving you the keys to $25 million to put new buses to work, to get folks to work, to school, to health care, to opportunity. We need you to win because when Detroit wins, America wins. We need your students here to win. Because when they win, America wins. We need their parents, the workers of the great city, the salt of the Earth to win, because when they win, America wins. Keep going, keep going, keep going.
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