Search results for ""author steve suitts""

In a sweeping reinterpretation of the history of disfranchisement, Steve Suitts illuminates how a century of political conflicts in Alabama came to shape both some of America’s best achievements in voting rights and its continuing struggles over voter suppression. A War of Sections tells the unknown political history symbolized today by the annual pilgrimage of presidents and celebrities across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is the story of how that crucial, tragic day in Selma in 1965 was only the flashpoint of a much longer history of failures and successes involving conflicts not only between Blacks and whites in Alabama but between white political factions warring in the state over voting rights.Suitts recasts the context and much of the content of disfranchisement in Alabama as an unremitting, decades- long sectional battle in white-only politics between the state’s rural Black Belt and north Alabama counties. He uncovers important Black and white heroes and villains who collectively shaped the arc of voting rights in Alabama and ultimately across the nation. A War of Sections offers a new understanding of the political dynamics of resistance and change through which a southern state’s longstanding democratic failures ironically provided motivation for and instruction to a reluctant nation regarding unmatched ways to advance universal voting. Along the way, the book introduces from this unheard past some prophetic voices that speak to the paramount issues of America’s commitment to the universal right to vote—then and now.

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In a sweeping reinterpretation of the history of disfranchisement, Steve Suitts illuminates how a century of political conflicts in Alabama came to shape both some of America’s best achievements in voting rights and its continuing struggles over voter suppression. A War of Sections tells the unknown political history symbolized today by the annual pilgrimage of presidents and celebrities across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is the story of how that crucial, tragic day in Selma in 1965 was only the flashpoint of a much longer history of failures and successes involving conflicts not only between Blacks and whites in Alabama but between white political factions warring in the state over voting rights.Suitts recasts the context and much of the content of disfranchisement in Alabama as an unremitting, decades- long sectional battle in white-only politics between the state’s rural Black Belt and north Alabama counties. He uncovers important Black and white heroes and villains who collectively shaped the arc of voting rights in Alabama and ultimately across the nation. A War of Sections offers a new understanding of the political dynamics of resistance and change through which a southern state’s longstanding democratic failures ironically provided motivation for and instruction to a reluctant nation regarding unmatched ways to advance universal voting. Along the way, the book introduces from this unheard past some prophetic voices that speak to the paramount issues of America’s commitment to the universal right to vote—then and now.

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School choice, largely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The rhetoric of school choice, however, resembles that of segregationists following Brown v. Board, who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers. In Overturning Brown, Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist policies and the modern school choice movement to expose the dangers lying behind the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparity has expanded exponentially in the years following Brown v. Board, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. It is only through recognizing the smoke and mirrors that Suitts deftly exposes in Overturning Brown that we understand the risk America’s underprivileged youth face with school voucher programs and as public funds are funneled into charter schools and predominately white and wealthy private schools.

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