Steve Suitts

Born in Winston County, which seceded from Alabama when the state seceded from the Union during the Civil War, STEVE SUITTS is today an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University.

 

Growing up in Alabama, Suitts attended elementary school in Haleyville, where he enjoyed Governor "Big Jim" Folsom's speeches, field trips, and baseball. He attended Appleby Junior High School and Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama, where he played basketball (much more poorly than his big brother), was secretary of the student council, and was in charge of "bumper stickers" for north Alabama for both Ryan DeGraffenried in 1962 and for Congressman Carl Elliott in 1966 in their unsuccessful bids to defeat George Wallace as governor.

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After attending the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Suitts began his career as a staff member of the Selma Project. He became founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union for five years; the executive director of the Southern Regional Council for eighteen years; and program coordinator, vice president, and senior fellow of the Southern Education Foundation for nineteen years.

 

Suitts is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution and Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement. He was the executive producer and one of the writers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award. Most recently, he served as chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based education advocacy project of the New Venture Fund. Suitts now lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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