A War of Sections

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

By Steve Suitts 

NewSouth Books, an imprint of the University of Georgia Press, 2024 

Hardcover: $120.95; Paperback: $36.95; eBook: $36.95 

Genre: Alabama History 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

In the early 2000s, I heard an interview with the U.S. Congressman from the Seventh District of Alabama, representing Alabama’s Black Belt. According to this congressman, if Alabama’s Black Belt counties were removed from the statistical data, Alabama would rank #7 nationally in productivity, #11 in new jobs, and #12 in health care. He referred to the Black Belt region as a “statistical anchor” and concluded, “But, it’s not going away.” Those statistics haunt me to this day, and after reading A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America by Steve Suitts, they start to make more sense. 

Steve Suitts, an Alabama native and the founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, is an adjunct professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts at Emory University and wrote a definitive biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. A War of Sections deals with the bitter truths and sorry political legacy that Alabama reckons with still. Suitts focuses on the white powerbrokers from the Black Belt whose oversized influence shaped the state immediately after Reconstruction and, in the name of white supremacy, drafted a draconian state constitution in 1901 that – with over nine hundred amendments and 400,000 words – still burdens the state today. That constitution was ratified, Suitts asserts, through “benign neglect of election fraud.” Black people and poor white people were effectively disfranchised, but racist demagoguery forbade their coalition. 

A War of Sections is a challenging and worthwhile read. The challenge is to make sense of all the names and statistics that fill the well-researched book. Suitts provides enough information and background for at least two books. His daunting use of statistics is necessary to illuminate the wide extent of the problem. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 is concerned with the status of voting rights in Alabama from the late eighteenth century to the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the “machinations and deceptions” incorporated to hamper Black voting influence. The 1966 Alabama Democratic Primary was the first state primary in sixty-five years with no poll tax, but that did not stop the chicanery. The chapters in Part 2 consider related issues and how the voting laws influenced the state’s citizens through the twentieth century and into the present. 

The book’s title refers to the distinct sections of Alabama and the discrepancies, alliances, and disputes among the Black Belt coalition of big white landowners in a majority Black district and south Alabama; the “Big Mules” of the urban and industrial areas; and the small farm agrarian regions of north Alabama. Black Belt and “Big Mule” politicians sometimes collaborated but were at odds at other times. Due to manipulations of state law, at a time when Birmingham and Jefferson County accounted for a quarter of all state gasoline sales, Jefferson County received only 1/67th of gasoline tax revenue. Black Belt politicians had highways routed out of the way for their personal economic advantage. With highways, as with state funding, “anything goes, so long as it goes to the Black Belt.” Historian Wayne Flynt observed that “in Alabama, the constitution did not empower the people; it empowered the legislature,” and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian, said Alabama election laws were designed to keep “the oligarchy in power.”  

A War of Sections presents a constant struggle between the forces of progress and forces of stagnation empowered by a racism that knew no bounds. A 1917 federal Bureau of Education report found that in the Black Belt county of Sumter, education expenditures were $26.16 per white child and sixty-six cents for their Black counterparts. Black World War I soldiers returning from Europe were put “in their place” upon their return to Alabama. Local authorities were advised to “crack down on ‘any negro soldier strutting about in uniform’ and bringing home new attitudes about voting and social equality.” Rev. A. Edward Banks, president of the Perry County Civic League, was arrested in 1959 “for preaching too much equality on Emancipation Day.” Such infuriating examples abound. 

Due to state voting requirements, majority Black counties might have few or no Black voter registrants and a white landowner might be required to vouch for their “character” for them to be allowed to register. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Martha Witt Smith, the registrar of Madison County and an emerging villain in Suitts’s book, claimed that compliance was not required of registrars outside the nine counties under the federal court order. 

A War of Sections features heroes and villains aplenty – some new names and some names that were familiar to Alabamians and nationally in the early to mid-twentieth century. It is a complicated and textural history with ties to national trends. Suitts demonstrates how the tactics of Alabama and the South influenced national politics moving forward, and politicians learned how to better spread hate and division without using the n-word. He examines how “Wallaceism” – the tactics of George C. Wallace – began to be adapted by national Republicans, starting with Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign’s “Southern Strategy.” In the 2013 Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder Supreme Court Case on voting rights, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion began the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by evoking legal theory from the discredited Dred Scott decision of 1857.  

In a lengthy 2011 opinion on a case challenging Alabama’s discriminatory tax structure, U.S. District Judge C. Lynwood Smith Jr. wrote, “Old sins cast long shadows.” Even so, the court concluded that the district could do nothing based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent. A national war of sections has emerged, the book asserts, “one in which most Southern and Western States joined the same political party with the same basic agenda and strategies of states’ rights and voter suppression that had once been the order of the day in Alabama for Black Belt minority rule.” Long shadows, indeed.  

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, wasted an undergraduate degree in political theory. He regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).