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612-822-4611
A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America

A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America

Hardcover

20th Century United States HistoryGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesRegional: South

ISBN10: 1588384918
ISBN13: 9781588384911
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Published: Jan 15 2024
Pages: 560
Weight: 2.18
Height: 1.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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 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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General Racism & Ethnic Studies