Anderson teaches at Emory University as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies. Her work focuses on the struggle for African Americans to gain not only civil rights, but equal access to education, health care, housing, and other matters. Her early books include Bourgeois Radicals, about the involvement of the NAACP and other Black organizations in the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and Eyes off the Prize, about the challenges of promoting human rights for Black people to the international community during the Cold War. In 2016’s White Rage, a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Anderson details how the Black Lives Matter movement is the result of White retaliation to Black progress in the form of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs (Carol Anderson: Historian, Educator, Author).

Anderson’s scholarship in the American history and the civil rights struggle makes her the right author to address voter suppression, which uses “the facade of race-neutral innocence” to disfranchise people of color (29). This is a difficult subject because voter suppression hides its real intent under legitimate-sounding concerns, making it easy to brush accusations aside as partisan or exaggerated.