After leaving SRC, Suitts became a writer, consultant, and lecturer. He also worked as a senior consultant with the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, which brought together scholars and activists in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa to explore racism and related social problems across national boundaries. In 2000-01, Suitts was an Independent Fellow of the Open Society Institute when he began a study of white poverty in the United States.

Today, Suitts is program coordinator at a regional education foundation and remains an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University in Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

Suitts began studying the life and times of Hugo Black as a research assistant to Charles Morgan, Jr., who started work on a Black biography in 1970. The biography languished because, as one of Alabama's great civil rights lawyers, Morgan was too busy helping to bring the U.S. Constitution to the South and, later, to lead a national movement to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.