Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx reflects on the 50th anniversary of the MOW - and how transit played a key role in igniting the civil rights movement, and how transit/transportation still plays a role:

When escaped slaves sought their freedom, they traveled on the Underground Railroad.

In the mid-1950s, a young woman who sat down and refused to get up—she did it on a transit bus. And the boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system resulted in changes that spread across the South.

The Civil Rights Movement was about all Americans having access to the same opportunities. And our transportation system connects people to those opportunities.

But unfortunately, transportation also has a history of dividing us. In many places, railroads have served to identify people who were living on “the wrong side of the tracks.” And rarely in the last century did an urban interstate highway plow through a neighborhood that wasn’t characterized as poor.

The challenge we face today is how to take a system that at one time codified bias and ensure that it now connects people, creates jobs, and allows people to grab a rung on what the President calls a “ladder of opportunity.”

In 2013, many communities are tearing down those divisions and building bridges.