Southern Poverty Law Center Totally Explained

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American non-profit legal organization, internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups. The Center has been described as a "a controversial, liberal organization" by columnist Thomas Edsall as it occasionally involves itself in broader issues such as the separation of church and state .
The Center is based in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Southern United States. It was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and civil rights leader Julian Bond as a civil rights law firm. In addition to free legal service to the victims of discrimination and hate crime, the Center publishes a quarterly Intelligence Report which investigates extremism and hate crimes in the United States. The Center has been criticized for its tactics and financial practices.

History

The Southern Poverty Law Center was organized by Dees and Levin in 1971 during a desegregation case (Smith v. Young Men's Christian Association), as a law firm to handle anti-discrimination cases in the United States. The organization's first president was Julian Bond, formerly of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bond served as president of the SPLC until 1979 and remains on its board of directors. In 1979 the Center brought the first of its many cases against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1981 the Center began its "Klanwatch" (now "Hatewatch") project to monitor and track the activities of the KKK, which has been expanded to include seven other types of hate organizations.
   In July 1983 the Klan firebombed the center's office destroying the building and records. Federal investigators said "the intruders went to work quickly, dousing files, desks and carpets with a petroleum based liquid, perhaps gasoline mixed with motor oil or diesel fuel and concentrating on the four corners of the 6,000-square-foot building." At the trial, "Joe M. Garner and Roy T. Downs Jr., identified as klansmen, and Charles Bailey pleaded guilty to a two-count information charging them with conspiring to threaten, oppress and intimidate members of black organizations represented by the law center."
   That same year, Dees became the primary assassination target of The Order, a revolutionary white supremacist group, for his work with the SPLC. Radio host Alan Berg was killed by the group outside his Colorado home; he was the number two on its list.
   In 1987 the group won a case against the United Klans of America. This included a $7 million judgment for the mother of Michael Donald, a black lynching victim in Alabama. In 1989 the Center unveiled its Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin. The Center's "Teaching Tolerance" project was initiated in 1991, and its "Klanwatch" program has gradually expanded to include other "anti-hate" monitoring projects and a list of reported "hate groups" in the United States.
   In October 1990, the SPLC won $12.5 million in damages against Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance when a Portland, Oregon, jury held the neo-Nazi group liable in the beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant. While Meztger lost his home and won't be publishing any more material, the full amount of the multi-million dollar reward wasn't recovered. In 1995 a group of four white males were indicted for plans to blow up the SPLC.
   A 1996 USA Today article claimed that the Southern Poverty Law Center is "the nation's richest civil rights organization", with $68 million in assets at the time. Starting in 1971, the SPLC set aside money for its endowment in future programs, which is currently $111 million in order "to carry on the struggle for tolerance and justice — for as long as it's needed."
   In May 1998, three white supremacists were arrested for planning a nationwide campaign of assassinations and bombings targeting "Morris Dees, an undisclosed federal judge in Illinois, a black radio-show host in Missouri, Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and the Anti-Defamation League in New York." Several neo-Nazi groups held a rally in front of SPLC headquarters in early 2003.
   In July 2007, the SPLC filed suit against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, where in July 2006 five Klansmen savagely beat Jordan Gruver, a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent at a Kentucky county fair. Since filing the suit the SPLC has received nearly a dozen threats "promising the most dangerous threat" ever faced. The website houses multiple initiatives:

Daily news about groups and individuals working for tolerance and fighting hate;
Guidebooks for adult and youth activists;
Practical resources for parents and teachers; ("Teaching Tolerance") and
Entertaining and educational games for young children.

According to the SPLC "Teaching Tolerance provides educators with free educational materials that promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity in the classroom and beyond."
   "Teaching Tolerance" is aimed at two different age groups of students with separate materials for teachers and parents. One portion of the project targets elementary school children, providing informational material on the history of the civil rights movement. The center's material for children includes a publication entitled "A fresh look at multicultural 'American English'" that explores the cultural history of common words. A project website designed for elementary school children includes an interactive program that allows users to "explore" political topics such as school mascots with Native American names, the Confederate flag, and popular music and entertainment. It alleges that many of these highlighted events exhibit cases of racial, gender, and sexual orientation insensitivity.
   A similar educational program aimed at teenagers in the middle and high school age groups includes a "Mix it Up" project urging readers to participate in various school activities that encourage interaction between different social groups. Other features of the teenager educational project include political activism tips and reports highlighting examples of student activism. A monthly SPLC publication for teens promotes a highlighted political movement, normally focusing on minority, feminist, and LGBT youth organizations. The program also provides publications to students such as "Ways to fight hate on campus" suggesting ideas for community activism and diversity education.
   "Teaching Tolerance" also provides advice and materials for parents aimed at encouraging multiculturalism in the upbringing of their children. (External Link

) A guide published by the project urges parents to "examine the 'diversity profile' for your children's friends," move to "integrated and economically diverse neighborhoods," and discourage children from playing with toys or adopting heroes that "promote violence." The publication also advises parents on the use of culturally sensitive language such as promoting gender-neutral phrasings such as "Someone Special Day" instead of the traditional Mothers Day or Fathers Day and urges them to ensure "cultural diversity reflected in your home's artwork, music and literature."

Documentaries

The SPLC also produces documentary films. Two have won Academy Awards for documentary short subject: "Mighty Times: The Children's March," in 2005(External Link

), and "A Time for Justice, America's Civil Rights Movement" in 1995.(External Link

) Five others have been nominated.

Notable cases

The Southern Poverty Law Center provides free legal services to the victims of hate crime, and has won many notable civil cases with large money awards for the plaintiffs. In addition to providing free magazines and videos on race relations to more than 50,000 schools, Dees and the SPLC "have been credited with devising innovative legal ways to cripple hate groups, including seizing their assets."
   The first SPLC case was filed against the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Montgomery, Alabama who "continued to segregate children, going so far as to ban kids who swam at an integrated pool from city-wide meets." In 1969, the YMCA refused to allow two African American children to its summer camp, and the SPLC sued on behalf of the children's parents. In the course of SPLC's lawsuit, Dees "uncovered a secret 1958 agreement between the city and the YMCA in which city officials gave the YMCA control of many city recreational activities." In May 1981 the courts sided with the Vietnamese fisherman and the SPLC, forcing the Klan to end harassment. Also in 1981 the SPLC won a case which "ordered an Alabama county to pay salaries to the staff of its first black probate judge, continuing a practice that, in violation of state law, had been in use for more than two decades." In 1987 the SPLC successfully brought a civil case, on behalf of the victims family, against the United Klans of America (UKA) for the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald, a nineteen year old black man in Mobile, Alabama. Unable to come up the $7 million awarded by the jury, the UKA were forced to turn over its national headquarters to Donald's mother, who then sold it and used the money to purchase her first house.
   On November 13, 1988 three white supremacists who were members of East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance beat Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian man who came to the United States to attend college, to death. In October 1990 the SPLC won a civil case on behalf of the deceased's family against WAR's operator Tom Metzger and Tom's son, John Metzger for a total of $12.5 million. The SPLC doesn't charge for their work, and Seraw didn't share any money won with the SPLC because the Metzger's didn't have millions, but rather the family only received assets from the Metzger's $125,000 house and a few thousand dollars. The Metzgers declared bankrupcty, and WAR went out of business. The cost of trial, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars was absorbed by the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League. Metzger still makes payments to Seraw's family.
   In May 1991 Harold Mansfield Jr., a black sailor / war veteran in the United States Navy, was murdered by a member of the neo-Nazi Church of the Creator (now called the Creativity Movement) (COTC). SPLC represented the victim's family in a civil case winning a judgement of $1 million from the church in March 1994. However, the church transferred ownership to William Pierce, head of the National Alliance, to avoid money being paid to Mansfield's heirs; the SPLC filed suit against Pierce for his role in the fraudulent scheme, and won an $85,000 judgment in 1995. The amount was upheld on appeal and the money was collected prior to Pierce's death in 2002.
   The SPLC won a $37.8 million verdict for Macedonia Baptist Church,a 100-year-old black church in Manning, South Carolina, against two Ku Klux Klan chapters and five Klansmen (Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Invisible Empire, Inc.) in July 1998. The money was awarded stemming from arson convictions in which the Klan burned down the historic black church in 1995. Morris Dees told the press, "If we put the Christian Knights out of business, what's that worth? We don't look at what we can collect. It's what the jury thinks this egregious conduct is worth that matters, along with the message it sends." According to the Washington Post the amount is the "largest-ever civil award for damages in a hate crime case." The lawsuit stemmed from the July 1998 attack when security guards at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho shot at Victoria Keenan and her son. Bullets struck their car several times then the car crashed and an Aryan Nations member held the Keenans at gunpoint.
   In 2002 the SPLC and the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore for authorizing a two ton display of the Ten Commandments on public property. Moore, late at night and without telling any other court justice, had installed a 5,280 pound (2400 kg) granite block, three feet wide by three feet deep by four feet tall, of the Ten Commandments. After refusing to obey several court rulings Moore was eventually removed from the court, and the statue was removed as well.
   On April 20, 2007 a civil jury in Linden, Texas awarded $9 million in damages to Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled black man, who was beaten and dumped along a desolate road by four white men in September 2003. The lawsuit was brought on Johnson's behalf by the SPLC. Four white males took Johnson to a party where has was knocked unconscious then dropped on his head, referred to as a nigger, and left in a ditch bleeding. Due to the event, "Johnson, 46, who suffered serious, permanent brain injuries from the attack, will require care for the rest of his life." At a criminal trial the four men received sentences of 30 to 60 days in county jail. The jury hoped that the verdict would improve race relations in the community stemming from a United States Department of Education investigation and other controversial verdicts. During the trial one of the defendants, Cory Hicks, referred to Johnson as "it".
   In July 2007 the SPLC filed suit on behalf of Jordan Gruver and his mother against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, Kentucky where in July 2006, five Klansmen savagely beat Gruver, a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent, at a Kentucky county fair. According to the lawsuit, five Klan members went to the Meade County Fairgrounds in Brandenburg, Kentucky, "to hand out business cards and flyers advertising a 'white-only' IKA function."

Intelligence Report

The SPLC's Intelligence Project monitors hate groups and extremists in the United States with their Intelligence Report. The report is published quarterly since 1981 and provides information regarding organizational efforts and tactics of hate groups. In addition to the Report, the SPLC publishes HateWatch Weekly that follows racism and extremism.

"Hate group" listings

The SPLC says "All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.... Listing here doesn't imply that a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity." The SPLC categorizes these groups as black separatist (such as the Nation of Islam), Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, racist skinhead, neo-Confederate, and other. Some organizations described by the SPLC as hate groups object to this characterization, particularly those in the other category. As of 2005, there were 161 organizations in the United States categorized as other. As of 2008, several of these have been moved into new categories, such as "Racist Music" and "Anti-Immigrant".

Neo-Confederate movement

The Southern Poverty Law Center is the principal group reporting on the neo-Confederate movement. A 2000 special report by the SPLC's Mark Potok in their magazine, Intelligence Report, describes a number of groups as neo-Confederate. The SPLC has also carried subsequent articles on the neo-Confederate movement. "Lincoln Reconstructed" published in 2003 in the Intelligence Report focuses on the resurgent demonization of Abraham Lincoln in the southern United States. The article quotes the chaplain of the Sons of Confederate Veterans as giving an invocation which recalled "the last real Christian civilization on Earth." David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine responded, as part of what is known as the David Horowitz Freedom Center controversy. The David Horowitz Freedom Center itself was identified as a neo-Confederate group by the SPLC.
The Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC) has been identified by the SPLC as a neo-Confederate organization, and it was criticised for misleading its supporters in order to get donations. The SLRC was criticized because its founder, Kirk D. Lyons' pre-SLRC defended controversial far right figures such as Tom Metzger and members of Aryan Nations.

Controversy and criticisms

The SPLC has attracted controversy surrounding its methods of identifying and monitoring "hate groups", allegedly exaggerating the level of threat from such groups. In the wake of harsh criticism, SPLC has received dozens of death/bomb threats. The SPLC was described by Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post in 1998 as a "a controversial, liberal organization that tracks conservative militia and 'patriot' organizations" that has uncovered much information on extremist groups. Groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), claim the SPLC's criticism that the CCC is tied to "White Supremacists" is inaccurate.
Professors of sociology Betty A. Dobratz, PhD (Iowa State University) and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, PhD (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), authors of The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride” wrote about SPLC and several other “watchdog” groups: “What the ‘watchdog’ groups focus on is at least partially influenced by the fact that these organizations depend on public financial support, and the public is likely to contribute to groups that they perceive are struggling against some major threat to America. We relied on SPLC and ADL reports for general information, but we've noticed differences between ways events have been reported and what we saw at rallies. For instance, events were sometimes portrayed in Klanwatch Intelligence Reports as more militant and dangerous with higher turnouts than we observed.”

Fundraising criticism

From February 12 through 14, 1994, a series in the Montgomery Advertiser by Dan Morse alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center practiced financial mismanagement, poor management practices and misleading fundraising practices. The newspaper summarized its investigation as producing evidence of "a complex portrait of a wealthy civil rights organization essentially controlled by one man: Morris Dees." The paper took a random sampling of donors, and found out that the average donor didn't know the Center was so well funded. Yet the articles were not all negative, with the authors noting "Other Law Center lawsuits forced cotton mills to improve conditions for workers" and the Center "developed new strategies for defending suspects on death row." In response to the criticism, Joe Levin told the paper: "The Advertiser's lack of interest in the center's programs and its obsessive interest in the center's financial affairs and Mr. Dees' personal life makes it obvious to me that the Advertiser simply wants to smear the center and Mr. Dees." The SPLC investigative series was a finalist for a 1995 Pulitzer Prize. A 1996 article reported Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights stated that Dees "is a fraud who has milked a lot of very wonderful well-intentioned people. If it's got headlines, Morris is there."
In November 2000, Harper's Magazine published an article titled "The Church of Morris Dees" by Ken Silverstein, which was critical of the SPLC. In it Silverstein wrote "Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support" because "the SPLC is already the wealthiest 'civil rights' group in America." Furthermore, Silverstein claimed "Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million," but then it sought 50 million dollars and again "upped the bar to $100 million" to allow the Center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising." However, in 2000 "the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising — $5.76 million last year — as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses." In fact, Silverstein cited the American Institute of Philanthropy who in 2000 gave "the center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning 'people like you'."
The charity evaluation organization Charity Navigator gives SPLC an overall rating of three out of four stars. According to Charity Navigator: program expenses are 66.4%, administrative expenses are 16.9%, and fundraising is 16.6%. The Center states that "During its last fiscal year, the Center spent approximately 65% of its total expenses on program services. The Center also placed a portion of its income into a special, board-designated endowment fund to support the Center's future work. At the end of the fiscal year, the endowment stood at $120.6 million."

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