Born in Winston County (which seceded from Alabama when the state seceded from the Union), Steve Suitts is an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University, a position he has held for the last twenty years, and has been chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based education advocacy project of the New Venture Fund. Suitts began his career as a staff member of the Selma Project. He was founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, a post he held 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 nearly twenty years. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution and 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 for its history of the Southern civil rights movement.
