Southern Poverty Law Center

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Southern Poverty Law Center

Founded by two white Alabama lawyers in 1971, the (SPLC) is in the early 2000s one of the best-known civil rights organizations in America. The SPLC, based in Montgomery, Alabama, initially focused strictly on legal matters related to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which mandates equal protection under the law to all American citizens.

In the 1980s the center pioneered new legal avenues of attack against the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, and it also created a new department to monitor the activities of these organizations and publish information about them. In the early 1990s it launched Teaching Tolerance, a major initiative to provide teachers with free high–quality classroom materials aimed at undermining prejudice and supporting racial tolerance and diversity. Late in the decade, the SPLC created a Web site that was more broadly aimed at Americans of all ages. In 2005 it opened the Civil Rights Memorial Center, including a monument dedicated to the martyrs of the civil rights movement. The memorial, which was dedicated on November 5, 1989, was created by famed designer Maya Lin.

The origins of the SPLC stretch back to 1969, when the YMCA in Montgomery was in its one-hundredth year as a segregated institution. After the YMCA refused to admit two black youngsters to its summer camp, the attorney Morris Dees, who would co–found the SPLC with Joseph J. Levin Jr., filed a class action lawsuit against the organization. A federal judge, noting a secret agreement between the YMCA and city for the organization to run recreational facilities, ruled that the YMCA had been invested with a “municipal character” and was therefore subject to laws affecting public bodies. In the end, U.S. district judge Frank Johnson ordered the organization to halt its discriminatory practices.

In January 1971, Dees and Levin opened the SPLC; they had some old furniture, one typewriter, a line of credit, and no other financial support. The first fund-raising letter they sent out was on behalf of a black man charged with the murder of a white schoolteacher. The trial judge had pronounced the man “probably guilty,” a characterization repeated in headlines in the Montgomery Advertiser.

In the years that followed, the SPLC’s lawyers took pro bono cases that few others had the resources or energy to pursue. Refusing lawyers’ fees or any part of the monetary awards it won for its plaintiffs, the SPLC helped to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Early lawsuits resulted in the reapportionment of the Alabama legislature, the integration of the formerly all–white Alabama Department of Public Safety, and the reform of barbaric state prison conditions. Cases in the 1970s and 1980s won equal rights for women in the armed forces, ended involuntary sterilization of women on welfare, gained monetary awards for textile workers with brown lung disease, and developed comprehensive strategies for lawyers defending capital cases. A number of SPLC cases resulted in landmark decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court that had far–reaching effects.

A resurgence of the Klan in the late 1970s sparked a whole new series of cases. After Klansmen violently attacked peaceful civil rights marchers in Decatur, Alabama, in 1979, SPLC’s lawyers brought the center’s first civil lawsuit against a major Klan organization. The case also led to the creation, in 1981, of a new SPLC department called Klanwatch (later renamed Intelligence Project) to investigate and monitor organized white–supremacist activity throughout the country. Similar cases followed. Using a legal theory sometimes referred to as “vicarious liability,” SPLC lawyers have since won civil judgments against forty–six individuals and nine major white supremacist organizations. The results were often dramatic. Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by Klansmen, was deeded a Klan headquarters building and purchased her first home with proceeds from its sale. The college education of an Ethiopian youth, Henok Seraw, was paid for with a judgment against White Aryan Resistance and its principals, who were held liable for the murder of Seraw’s father. A black South Carolina church burned to the ground by a Klan group was awarded the largest–ever judgment against a hate group, $37.8 million (a judge later reduced that amount to $21.5 million). Two individuals who were terrorized by gun–wielding thugs from the Aryan Nations won a judgment that resulted in the neo–Nazi group’s leader being forced to auction off its Idaho headquarters compound. Other lawsuits halted the harassment of Vietnamese shrimp fishermen by the Klan in Texas and paramilitary training that was being offered by the Klan–related White Patriot Party in North Carolina. Though each case differed in its particulars, all of them were based on the notion of holding white supremacist leaders responsible for the criminal actions of their followers.

Since the mid–1990s, the SPLC’s legal department has concentrated on high–impact cases on behalf of those who typically have few defenders. These have included a number of cases related to prison conditions, such as the reintroduction of chain gangs in Alabama, the use of the barbaric “hitching post” as punishment for prisoners refusing to work, and abominable medical services in penitentiaries (a federal judge found, in a 1976 case brought by the SPLC, that Alabama’s prisons were “wholly unfit for human habitation’’). Several cases have focused on the brutal treatment of children in juvenile–offender facilities, notably in Louisiana. In 2004 the SPLC created a new legal program, the Immigrant Justice Project, meant to protect the rights of legal and undocumented immigrants. Some of the project’s first cases were brought against exploitative forestry companies.

Klanwatch, which essentially started as the investigative arm of the SPLC’s legal department, began publishing a small newsletter when it launched operations in 1981. This publication was meant to inform law enforcement officials about developments on the radical right, particularly with regard to the Klan. Over the years, the newsletter grew into a major investigative magazine, going from a short black–and–white format to a full–color glossy periodical in 1999. The magazine also expanded its bailiwick greatly, taking in whole new sections of the radical right, including the militia movement, tax protesters, black separatists, Neo-Nazis, the anti–immigration movement, the neo–Confederate movement, and much more. By 2005, the magazine, Intelligence Report, had won numerous journalistic and design awards and was read by more than 300,000 people around America.

Between its legal cases against hate groups and the work of its Intelligence Project (the renamed Klanwatch), the SPLC was so effective that it enraged literally hundreds of white supremacist criminals. In 1983 the SPLC’s first office was destroyed by Klan arsonists who broke in at night, then sprayed the area with gasoline and ignited it. Dees and others at the SPLC were targeted for death on several occasions. By 2005, more than twenty individuals had been sent to federal prison for their role in a series of plots aimed at destroying the center or assassinating Dees.

The third major program area of SPLC, after the legal department and the Intelligence Project, was created in 1991. Teaching Tolerance was meant to foster multi–culturalism and tolerance among future generations, specifically by targeting educational material to teachers of kindergarten and the twelfth grade. It produced the first issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine, which would go on to win numerous educational and other awards, in 1992. By 2005, the magazine was being distributed free of charge to more than 600,000 educators nationwide. Teaching Tolerance also has produced a series of curriculum kits, including a film and teacher’s guide, that are in use in more than 80,000 schools. Two of these films, A Time for Justice: America’s Civil Rights Movement and Mighty Times: The Children’s March, won Oscars for best short documentaries. Another educational film in the same series, Mighty Times: Legacy of Rosa Parks, won an Emmy Award. A spin–off project, the Tolerance.org Web site, was created as a separate department in the late 1990s, but it was eventually subsumed under Teaching Tolerance. On the site, one can find articles from SPLC and other publishers about tolerance, racism, and related themes.

The SPLC has also worked to ensure that the martyrs of the civil rights movement, and all that they accomplished, will never be forgotten. In the late 1980s it asked Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to design the Civil Rights Memorial. The monument, made of black granite and dedicated to some forty people who died between 1954 and 1968, has become a major

tourist attraction in Alabama, drawing visitors from around the country and the world, along with daily busloads of schoolchildren. In 2005 the SPLC opened the adjoining Civil Rights Memorial Center, the organization’s first public facility. The new center features an SPLC–made film; exhibits on civil rights, hate groups, and the international struggle for human rights; and a classroom for instruction.