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XPost: atl.general

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-
founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve
been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used
to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the
center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs,
we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King,
Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like
waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls
down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning
idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the
S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited
listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases
against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of
direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The
mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy
band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working
under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in
the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a
writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours
working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of
super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work
before I’d even begun it.

The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown
Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s
Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently
built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the
social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a
“Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.”
It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an
underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic
security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which
made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure
at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial
dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was
then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost
all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,”
one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional
staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations
officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just
two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t
help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the
Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will
never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you
live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the
lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on
here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again.
“Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation
as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d
peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had
been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among
other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination
within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had
revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a
hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries
to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most
nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great
Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive,
had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime
mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who
viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking
gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a
business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or
causes, it’s all the same.”

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a
rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about
what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming
female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues
about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the
unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top
of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard
Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would
ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative
bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian,
a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But
everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a
fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and
gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like
we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly
profitable scam.

For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the
center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing
back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two,
had been fired. The official statement sent by Cohen, who took
control of the S.P.L.C. in 2003, didn’t specify why Dees had
been dismissed, but it contained some broad hints. “We’re
committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we
espouse—truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” Cohen wrote.
“When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter
his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and
must take appropriate action.” Dees’s profile was immediately
erased from the S.P.L.C.’s Web site—amazing, considering that he
had remained, to the end, the main face and voice of the center,
his signature on most of the direct-mail appeals that didn’t
come from celebrity supporters, such as the author Toni Morrison.

While right-wingers tweeted gleefully about the demise of a
figure they’d long vilified—“Hate group founder has been fired
by his hate group,” the alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich
chirped—S.P.L.C. alums immediately reconnected with one another,
buzzing about what might have happened and puzzling over the
timing, sixteen years after Dees handed the reins to Cohen and
went into semi-retirement. “I guess there’s nothing like a
funeral to bring families back together,” another former writer
at the center said, speculating about what might have prompted
the move. “It could be racial, sexual, financial—that place was
a virtual buffet of injustices,” she said. Why would they fire
him now?

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political
Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff
revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers,
which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney
Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at
the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two
letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that
multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years
had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in
retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied
the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re
talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but
insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a
widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the
center’s current leadership, stretching back many years. (The
S.P.L.C. has since appointed Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff
for Michelle Obama, to conduct a review of its workplace
environment.) If Cohen and other senior leaders thought that
they could shunt the blame, the riled-up staffers seem
determined to prove them wrong. One of my former female
colleagues told me that she didn’t want to go into details of
her harassment for this story, because she believes the focus
should be on the S.P.L.C.’s current leadership. “I just gotta
hope your piece helps keep the momentum for change going,” she
said. Stephen Bright, a Yale professor and longtime S.P.L.C.
critic, told me, “These chickens took a very long flight before
they came home to roost.” The question, for current and former
staffers alike, is how many chickens will come to justice before
this long-overdue reckoning is complete.


The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never
been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s
Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty
million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-
two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent
spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal
Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple,
which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its
iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars.
The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred
and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets
of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-
time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers. But none
of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If
you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge
you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,”
a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join
our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us.
Working together, we can push back against these bigots.”

In 1971, when the center opened, Dees was already a colorful and
controversial figure in Alabama. While studying law at the
University of Alabama, in the late nineteen-fifties, “Dees sold
holly wreaths and birthday cakes, published a student telephone
directory, dabbled in real estate,” Egerton wrote. He also
worked for George Wallace’s first, unsuccessful bid for
governor, in 1958. Upon graduating, in 1960, Dees teamed up with
another ambitious student, Millard Fuller, who’d go on to found
Habitat for Humanity. They opened a direct-mail business in
Montgomery, selling doormats, tractor-seat cushions, and
cookbooks. “Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership,
shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” Fuller
would later recall. “We were not particular about how we did
it.” While running their business, the two also practiced law.
In 1961, they defended one of the men charged with beating up
Freedom Riders at a bus terminal in Montgomery. According to
Fuller, “Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens’
Council.”

In the late sixties, Dees sold the direct-mail operation to the
Times Mirror Company, of Los Angeles, reportedly for between six
and seven million dollars. But he soon sniffed out a new avenue
for his marketing genius. In 1969, he successfully sued to
integrate the local Y.M.C.A., after two black children were
turned away from summer camp. Two years later, he co-founded the
Law Center, with another Montgomery attorney, Joe Levin, Jr. He
volunteered to raise money for George McGovern’s Presidential
campaign, and, with McGovern’s blessing, used its donor list of
seven hundred thousand people to help launch the S.P.L.C.’s
direct-mail operations. The center won some big cases early on,
including a lawsuit that forced the Alabama legislature to
divide into single-member districts, insuring the election of
the state’s first African-American lawmakers since
Reconstruction. In 1975, the S.P.L.C. started a defense fund for
Joan Little, a black prisoner in North Carolina who’d stabbed to
death a jailer who attempted to rape her; the case became a
national sensation and drew attention to the intrepid little
operation in Montgomery. Dees, of course, had already positioned
the Law Center to capitalize on the positive press.

A decade or so later, the center began to abandon poverty
law—representing death-row defendants and others who lacked the
means to hire proper representation—to focus on taking down the
Ku Klux Klan. This was a seemingly odd mission, given that the
Klan, which had millions of members in the nineteen-twenties,
was mostly a spent force by the mid-eighties, with only an
estimated ten thousand members scattered across the country. But
“Dees saw the Klan as a perfect target,” Egerton wrote. For
millions of Americans, the K.K.K. still personified violent
white supremacy in America, and Dees “perceived chinks in the
Klan’s armor: poverty and poor education in its ranks,
competitive squabbling among the leaders, scattered and
disunited factions, undisciplined behavior, limited funds, few
if any good lawyers.” Along with legal challenges to what was
left of the Klan, the center launched Klanwatch, which monitored
the group’s activities. Klanwatch was the seed for what became
the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists
and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list.

The only thing easier than beating the Klan in court—“like
shooting fish in a barrel,” one of Dees’s associates told
Egerton—was raising money off Klan-fighting from liberals up
north, who still had fresh visions of the violent confrontations
of the sixties in their heads. The S.P.L.C. got a huge publicity
boost in July, 1983, when three Klansmen firebombed its
headquarters. A melted clock from the burned-down building,
stuck at 3:47 A.M., is featured in the main lobby of the
Montgomery office today. In 1987, the center won a landmark seven-million-dollar damage judgment against the Klan; a decade
later, in 1998, it scored a thirty-eight-million-dollar judgment
against Klansmen who burned down a black church in South
Carolina. With those victories, Dees claimed the right to boast
into perpetuity that the S.P.L.C. had effectively “shut down”
the K.K.K.

By the time I touched down in Montgomery, the center had
increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an
educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding
its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of
right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected
in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list,
which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both
small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and
a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the
center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the “rising
tide of hate” discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and
reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the
groups. As critics have long pointed out, however, the hate-
group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many
groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council
and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by
decrying the S.P.L.C.’s “attacks.”

In recent years, the center has broadened its legal work,
returning to some poverty law; around eighty attorneys now work
in five Southern states, challenging, among other things, penal juvenile-justice systems and draconian anti-immigration laws.
But the center continues to take in far more than it spends. And
it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw
national attention. The most notable, when I was there, was a
lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument that was brazenly
placed in the main lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building,
just across the street from S.P.L.C. headquarters, by Roy Moore,
who was then the state’s chief justice. Like the S.P.L.C.’s well-
publicized 2017 lawsuit against Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi
publisher of the Daily Stormer, it was a vintage example of the
center’s central strategy: taking on cases guaranteed to make
headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to
potential donors that the center has not only all the right
enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.

These days, whenever I tell people in New York or Washington,
D.C., that I used to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center,
their eyes tend to light up. “Oh, wow, what was that like?”
they’ll ask. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I’ll regale them
with stories about the reporting I did there—exposing anti-
immigration extremists on the Arizona-Mexico border, tracking
down a wave of anti-transgender hate crimes, writing a
comprehensive history of the religious right’s war on gays. But
then, considering whether to explain what an unsettling
experience it could be, I’ll add, “It’s complicated, though,”
and try to change the subject.

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it
all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were
working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting
all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad
guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything:
the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual
harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down
management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the
legions of donors who believed that their money was being used,
faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of
Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in
Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security
regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that,
though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism,
“hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than
ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The
S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.

It wasn’t funny then. At this moment, it seems even grimmer. The
firing of Dees has flushed up all the uncomfortable questions
again. Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying
silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that
never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial
discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out?
“Of course we did,” a former colleague told me, as we parsed the
news over the phone. “It’s shameful, but when you’re there you
kind of end up accepting things. I never even considered
speaking out when things happened to me! It doesn’t feel good to
recognize that. I was so into the work, and so motivated by it,
I kind of shrugged off what was going on.” A couple of days
later, she texted me: “I’m having SPLC nightmares.” Aren’t we
all, I thought.

A previous version of this article misidentified the S.P.L.C.
attorney who argued the Roy Moore case. It misstated the total
number of S.P.L.C. employees in 2001 and the current number of
staff attorneys.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris- dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center
 

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