A War of Sections
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.
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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 long-standing 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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Published in 2024.
Author Q and A
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1. What does your book say about the tools of voting rights suppression in the past and today?
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the primary focus for suppressing voting rights has changed from preventing and obstructing voter registration in the first half of the century to diluting the effects of voting by racial minorities in the last half. In other words, after Black folks won the right to register and to vote, opposition to their participation in the democratic process shifted to preventing their votes from counting as much as others.
But throughout this history – and even longer – those who have attempted to suppress the voting always have done so with the pretense that they are advancing democracy, following a higher law, or protecting the rights of those whom they are suppressing.
2. What topic in the field of voting rights did you address in your book that you felt had been understated in past writings on the subject?
There were actually two primary topics along these lines. First, I wanted to remind readers that the gains in voting rights that were secured by the Selma March and the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its enforcement were the progressive work of thousands of black, white, and brown citizens in the South who for decades pushed and pulled to realize the promise of the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution. It was a long journey.
Second, I hoped the reader would understand from the book that the relatively small number of persons who have led the fight against universal voting rights may have done so due to their own racist views, but they always used their unearned, disproportionate political power to secure for themselves and their allies ill-gotten gains through the government. In other words, they used to denial of voting rights in order to enrich themselves. By doing so, they harmed both democracy and all whom they governed.
3. What is one example in the book of how power works in this country?
Nothing shows this misuse of raw political power through voter suppression than what happened in the Alabama Black Belt in the public schools. By denying black folks the right to vote, Black Belt planters in Alabama were able to use school funding formulas to lavishly finance the education of their children through others’ tax dollars while providing black parents in their area a mere pittance of funds for educating their children. For example, in 1911 in Sumter County Alabama, white planters spent $41.38 in educating each white child with funds generated from taxpayers in other parts of Alabama while spending only $2.01 for black students’ public education in the county. The power to suppress black voting enriched white planters for generations with ill-gotten gains.
4. What should people do in districts that may be targeted for voter suppression?
The history I document suggest that there is no single way to overcome the various methods of voter suppression except through constant challenges to those in power who are enabling suppression. At times, it means undertaking legal challenges. At times, it means opposing or supporting legislation. And at times it has meant working to shape public opinion about the unfairness and ill effects of voter suppression. The means of protest and challenge depend upon the times and the circumstances, but as black folks in Alabama and other southern states taught us in past decades, it always requires constant strategies and vigilance by many to advance everyone’s right to vote.
5. What are three policies relating to voting you would like to see enacted?
My three would be: 1) passage of the federal John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the 1965 Act as amended: 2) provide for automatic voter registration of all citizens by the age of 18; and 3) a universal period for advance voting and free transportation to any and all citizens to go to and from the polls to vote on election day.