When the Hill shared a video of Buttigieg making that claim, it quickly (again) became a focus of mockery among right-wing commentators and some Republican politicians. But in short order, Buttigieg’s comments also served as an opportunity not only to elevate the specific story to which he was referring but the utility of educating Americans about a complicated history of systemic racism.
The secretary was referring to a story from Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” a book that is generally recognized as one of the premier examples of journalism in modern American history. It centers on Robert Moses, a mid-century New York City official who set out to reshape how the city’s residents moved — mostly successfully. In that book, Caro describes one particular goal of Moses’s: keeping poor Black people from busing to Long Island’s Jones Beach.
Moses “had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit,” Caro wrote, “he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed [general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission Sidney] Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous.”
What’s more, buses needed permits to enter parks, permits that were often denied to those bringing Black residents to Jones Beach.
In 2017, a reporter for Bloomberg decided to test the veracity of this anecdote, described to Caro by Shapiro himself. Thomas Campanella found that it was true.
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