The Southern Poverty Law Center: Past, Present, Future
The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded as a non-profit in 1971 in
Montgomery, Alabama, by Morris Dees, a lawyer who had made millions
through direct mail marketing, and Joseph Levin, also an Alabama
attorney. Its initial purpose was to advance civil rights through
legal action. Both Dees and Levin were liberal Democrats; following
the founding of SPLC Dees raised tens of millions for George McGovern,
Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and other Democratic presidential
candidates.
In the first decade of its existence SPLC devoted itself primarily to
litigation against state, city, and federal governmental instances of
supposed discrimination, including alleged racial imbalance among
Alabama state troopers, in the application of the death penalty,
apportionment of electoral districts, etc. Perhaps its highest profile
case in those years was the murder trial of Joan Little, a black
career criminal accused of murdering a white prison guard. During the
trial Dees was arrested and removed from the courtroom for attempting
to bribe a pro-Little witness, though he was never tried.
In 1981 SPLC began its Klanwatch project, which grew out of research
for appeal of the conviction of a black for shooting a Klansman two
years earlier in Decatur, Alabama. Klanwatch activities included
monitoring of Klan and Nazi groups and--far more effective for gaining
media notice and support from its contributors, reportedly
disproportionately older, monied Jewish constituency from New York and
other large cities--vastly exaggerating their strength and menace.
Klanwatch has reportedly also been a means for SPLC to share
information on extreme-right groups with contacts in the FBI and other
law enforcement departments following restrictions on government
infiltration and surveillance of lawful organizations imposed in the
1970s.
During the 1980s SPLC began to concentrate on suing Klan, Nazi, and
other racialist groups for crimes committed by their members against
nonwhites. By then commanding large financial and legal resources (and
swaying juries with often tenuous evidence that members' crimes had
been authorized by leadership), the Center was able to win a
succession of huge judgments against various fringe groups,
effectively bankrupting most of them. The defendants were able to pay
only small fractions of the monies obtained to SPLC's clients, while
SPLC was able to exploit the trials to bring in millions in donations
from its supporters. The 1983 destruction of its offices in an arson
attack by Klansmen, far from being a setback, served as both an
affirmation of SPLC's effectiveness and an opportunity to raise funds
for a glittering new headquarters.
During the same decade SPLC began to draw criticism from the
mainstream. Former employees, including the influential black activist
Randall Robinson, faulted the shift toward sensationalizing and
exploiting the vestigial Klan and Nazi movements at the expense of its
original legal agenda. Others pointed to the virtual absence of blacks
among the leadership of an organization expressly dedicated to
sustaining and expanding the African-American civil rights movement.
And, as SPLC's revenues continued to grow, analysts of nonprofits
expressed increasing concern at the serious imbalance between the
Center's vast assets and its relatively small expenditures.
During the 1990s SPLC extended its reach to new audiences through new
programs. In 1991 it began "Teaching Tolerance," an initiative aimed
at promoting "diversity" in elementary and high schools through
distributing materials aimed at inducing a reverential awe for racial,
religious, and sexual minorities. More ominously, in 1992 the Center
began a program of indoctrinating local, state, and federal police
organizations in its version of an extremist threat emanating from the
far right; aside from promoting police snooping on harmless and
law-abiding groups, SPLC's "training" focused on solving "hate
crimes"--a category of offense heavily prone to subjective and
politicized interpretation--allegedly committed or inspired by its
targets.
The growth of citizen "militias," populist organizations devoted to
paramilitary training, provided the Center with new grist for its
fundraising and publicity during the Clinton presidency. The 1995
bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh,
despite his lack of provable links to right-wing groups, was expertly
exploited by SPLC (which sent out an Oklahoma City-themed fundraising
appeal within days of the attack). Meanwhile, it continued to litigate
and win big (but usually unrecoverable) judgments against marginal
"hate" groups, including the Church of the Creator and the Christian
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for crimes committed by "loose cannon"
members.
At the same time SPLC was gradually shifting its emphasis from
violence-prone groups on the right-wing fringe to attacking
organizations and individuals on ideological grounds. The Center has
claimed that its discovery of "links" between nonviolent nationalist
groups and Klan and Nazi organizations inspired this shift; just as
likely the need to sensationalize for fundraising and the opportunity
to smear groups hostile to SPLC's by now pronouncedly leftist and
lockstep "multiculturalist" ideology inspired the unearthing of the
often tenuous links. To signify its new approach, in 1998 the Center
renamed "Klanwatch" the "Intelligence Project."
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a setback for SPLC's efforts to
attribute domestic terror almost entirely to the extreme nationalist
fringe: the slaughter of 9/11 emanated from Third World terrorists,
most of whom were in America illegally. The Center's response to 9/11
has been to combat alleged discrimination aimed at Muslims and to
oppose Bush administration security measures it deems infringe on
civil rights. SPLC has continued a strident propaganda that claims
that domestic rightists, rather than Islamist immigrants, constitute
the chief threat to America's security. Developments such as the
recent murderous rampage at Ft. Hood by a Muslim extremist and various
terror plots uncovered by the FBI have undercut the Center's efforts;
also detrimental to SPLC's rosy view of diversity has been increasing
violence between nonwhite groups, above all between blacks and
Hispanics.
Earlier this year a Missouri state agency, working on guidelines
derived from SPLC and its allies, urged police that supporters of
Texas Congressman Ron Paul, former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, and
other conservative politicians should be considered " `militia'
influenced terrorists"; popular furor forced withdrawal of the
Missouri instructions. The Missouri report was merely a somewhat more
strident version of one issued by the Department of Homeland Security,
which downplayed the threat from Muslim extremists while warning
against a putative terror danger from U.S. veterans back from Iraq and
Afghanistan. Both reports depended heavily on SPLC findings.
During the past decade has SPLC further widened its web of "hate,"
classifying nonracialist, mainstream organizations that opposed its
program for imposed diversity as "hate groups." Preeminent among the
groups and individuals targeted have been moderate voices calling for
immigration control. The Center has enjoyed marked success in tagging
such opponents of illegal immigration as John Tanton and Roy Beck as
"nativist extremists." The recent success of its campaign to oust CNN
reporter Lou Dobbs is to date the high water mark of SPLC's campaign
to restrict Americans' freedom of speech on the questions of
immigration and citizenship--a campaign that is recognizably part of a
broader effort to control discussion on racial and national issues by
establishing the Center as the arbiter of acceptable public speech.
Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center appears to be as influential
and effective as ever. Most of SPLC's effectiveness can be traced to
the vision Morris Dees, who has combined a genius for salesmanship and
promotion with a determination to enlist the fervor of the radical
fringe to power his cause. Dees's ability to appeal urgently and
emotionally to monied sympathizers of the Old Left for donations and
to recruit leftist, Jewish, and gay zealots to advance the Center's
agenda, one that is well to the left of America's current consensus as
well its national traditions, has been central to SPLC's impact.
Working behind a façade of mainstream liberalism, the Center has been
able to seamlessly integrate its fundraising, propaganda, legal, and
"education" activities so that they mesh as effortlessly as the gears
of a well-oiled machine to continually increase its vast assets,
burnish its image, silence and destroy its enemies, and make its
radical designs public policy.
Thwarting SPLC's efforts at censorship, let alone depriving the Center
of the goodwill that it enjoys from government, media, and much of the
public, will thus not be easy. A strategy, with supporting data, for
countering SPLC based on key internal contradictions, is presented
below. This strategy first identifies, in contradiction with the
Center's standing as a respectable think tank, serious deficiencies in
its research and reporting on "hate groups," "hate crimes," and
domestic terrorism. Next, the source of these deficiencies is
revealed: SPLC's deliberate distortion for propaganda's sake, above
all in diabolizing its targets and exaggerating their threat, in order
to increase donations as well as to affect policy and perceptions
regarding hate groups. To further explain such distortion, the leftist
and Communist affinities of a number of SPLC's staffers and
contributors to the Center's publications are outlined, as well as an
apparently high percentage of zealots for gay rights, minority
preference, and other SPLC causes among staffers and contributors.
For its implementation, the recommended strategy calls for exploiting
and explaining these deficiencies and contradictions, thus
"deconstructing" SPLC. That these flaws spring from characteristics
central to SPLC (e.g., an image of probity that masks its lack of
scruples in amassing a vast war chest to advance covertly leftist
aims) suggests their exploitation can hit home. Furthermore, this
strategy offers an approach that can be hard-hitting yet objective,
deriving from facts and analysis easily verifiable from the Center's
own publications and website and thus evading the trap of sounding
subjective and biased one's self.
Personnel
Founder and Chief Counsel Morris S. Dees
Founder and leader Morris Seligman Dees has been central to SPLC's
success from 1971 to the present day. The son of an Alabama farmer (b.
December 16, 1936, in Shorter, Alabama), Dees has been energetic and
enterprising from an early age. Ascribing his best lessons in sales to
his boyhood exposure to Baptist preachers ("I learned everything I
know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending
Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch
salvation--why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling"),
http://www.americanpatrol.com/SPLC/ChurchofMorrisDees001100.html
Dees amassed a fortune from direct marketing while still at the
University of Alabama law school. The specifics on Dees's embrace of
left-liberal politics and subsequent decision to advance the
African-American civil rights movement through SPLC are uncertain;
Dees himself has cast skepticism on the significance of an oft-cited
epiphany he earlier claimed to have experienced in 1969.
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/dees.jsp
http://www.superlawyers.com/alabama/article/QandA-Morris-Dees/21f62c22-a996-4e33-87c9-10a6646468f6.html
Whatever psychological, sociological, or other motives inspired Dees's
alleged conversion, his prodigious abilities in selling and promoting
enabled him to make the SPLC a going concern--the policies and assets
of which he seems to firmly control through well-chosen proxies--from
its foundation. While heading SPLC and actively leading its legal work
in the 1970s and `80s, Dees also raised millions for Democratic
presidential candidates George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy,
and Gary Hart, sometimes taking mailing lists of Democratic prospects
in payment for his services.
Morris Dees's talents and character have played the key role in the
development of the Center from 1) a civil-rights law firm to 2) a
public relations-savvy crusader against the Klan to 3) its present
incarnation as a watchdog whose bark and bite threaten free discussion
of America's racial and immigration problems. Dees's ability to enlist
talent and to attract money from the radical fringe, coupled with his
considerable business skills, have resulted in an organization that
effectively advances a leftist agenda utilizing state of the art
fundraising and publicity methods. Nearly as decisive has been his
stated desire for a "blend of exciting [as well as] socially
significant cases," which surely played a role in the de-emphasizing
of the humdrum affirmative action suits the Center began with.
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/levin.jsp
SPLC's often criticized lack of scruples in its legal tactics (Dees
himself was arrested for suborning perjury in the 1970s);
[41]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Little in smearing and spying on
its opponents; and above all in its fundraising techniques, likely
reflect traits of its founder, whom Millard Farmer, a former SPLC
attorney, likened to notorious televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker,
with the proviso that he wished not to insult the Bakkers by the
comparison.
http://www.americanpatrol.com/SPLC/ChurchofMorrisDees001100.html
Dees has weathered numerous attacks from left and right accusing him
of opportunism, greed, and various sexual quirks (alleged by a former
wife during divorce proceedings). Possibly his embrace of the civil
rights agenda and left-liberal politics is the result of social
resentments over his allegedly humble beginnings as the son of a
sharecropper. Perhaps his behavior and motives are better explained by
a craving to be famous, like his hero, early twentieth century radical
lawyer Clarence Darrow, a desire colored by what seems to be a
considerable personal vanity.
http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2333
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/dees.jsp
Whatever the determinants of his character and motives, whatever his
private peccadilloes, Dees (and more important his support base) have
so far proved unflappable in the face of personal attacks. Thus it is
urged that successful attacks on Dees and SPLC will target
contradictions and deficiencies in the SPLC's claimed expertise on
hate groups, revealing the biases and self-interest behind
these.
Co-Founder Joseph J. Levin, Jr.
SPLC cofounder Joseph J. Levin has been a fairly colorless counterpart
to Dees, but his experience in Washington with the federal government
and in private practice has brought SPLC much practical legal
expertise. He has served as SPLC's legal director SPLC (1971-6), as
president and board chairman, and, since 2003, as the Center's
president emeritus.
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/levin.jsp
While in private practice, Levin represented the University of North
Carolina in a desegregation suit brought against it by the U.S.
Health, Education and Welfare Department. Levin subsequently
represented universities in Alabama and Louisiana in similar efforts
to mitigate desegregation and affirmative action decrees from
Washington, efforts ostensibly contrary to SPLC's blanket support for
forced integration.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KPVBQitzjcwC&pg=PA347&lpg=PA347&dq=Power,+Purpose+and+Higher+Education+Friday+Levin
Indeed, a writer for the Center recently characterized a black
academic's opposition to affirmative action akin to that defended by
Levin as "Appeasing the Beast." One can only speculate which Kleagle
or Obersturmbannfuehrer SPLC might have linked and tied Levin to if he
weren't already intimately connected to the SPLC.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=66
President and CEO Richard Cohen
Cohen, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1955, has headed the SPLC since
2003, succeeding Joseph R. Levin. Cohen, a graduate of Columbia and
the University of Virginia's law school, had previously been SPLC's
legal director (from 1986 to 2003).
http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/alumni/uvalawyer/sp06/civil.htm
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=38
By all indications Cohen is a diligent lawyer and administrator who
led the Center to many court victories, to be sure against
organizations that were often marginal even by the standards of the Ku
Klux Klan. Doubtless much of the responsibility for executing a
strategy whereby such organizations could be held civilly accountable
for unauthorized outrages by members, then assessed
multimillion-dollar judgments that, while uncollectible, could
immediately be turned into propaganda for even more lucrative appeals,
belongs to Cohen.
As the Center's legal director Cohen also brought successful suits on
behalf of prisoners, illegal aliens, "equal education," and was able
to force removal of the Southern battle flag from the Alabama State
House in Montgomery.
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=38
http://www.splcenter.org/center/splcreport/article.jsp?aid=59
As president and CEO Cohen has lobbied energetically to clear the Jena
6 (black students who brutally beat a white in the high school
cafeteria) and for solving and prosecution of alleged murders
committed during the civil rights era (the FBI's "Cold Cases"
project).
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=268
Under Cohen's leadership the Center inaugurated its Immigrant Justice
Project, which (see consideration below) appears to dodge the illegal
hiring and exploitation of immigrants in the manufacturing and retail
sectors in favor of concentrating on easier targets among employers of
migrant agricultural labor in the South.
Cohen frequently testifies before Congress and other bodies on behalf
of legislation favored by SPLC and other aspects of the Center's
agenda. Two years ago, in sworn testimony, he told the U.S. House
Judiciary Committee that an unsolved, and almost certainly bogus,
noose hanging at Columbia University was an example of the "widespread
nature of hate crimes."
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?sid=106
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1910308/posts
http://www.ivygateblog.com/2008/02/columbia-professor-hangs-her-own-noose-by-plagiarizing/
In other testimony to Congress, Cohen urged a two-track approach to
"hate crimes" by juveniles, urging stern prosecution of teenage
offenders but calling for prosecutorial discretion for, e.g., the
(black) "Jena Six" assailants of a white classmate; Cohen told
legislators that "prosecutors see race," strongly implying that
prosecutors should see white offenders and black victims
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=289
President Emeritus, Julian Bond
Bond, a civil rights pioneer associated with the movement's radical
wing (he was a founder of the leftist Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee), was SPLC's first president (1971-9) and now serves as the
Center's president emeritus and a member of its Board of Directors.
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/bond.jsp
Bond has had a varied career as a state legislator, academic, and
chairman of the NAACP, but accusations of heavy cocaine use from his
estranged wife and political opponents in the 1980s and `90s marred
his reputation (and perhaps pointed to a problem that reduced his
effectiveness).
http://www.sftbs.org/content/julian-bond
Unlike many of the civil rights movement's adherents, Bond has
championed black-Jewish collaboration, and is currently married to the
former Pamela Horowitz. Bond is an ardent proponent of gay marriage,
and has described the Confederate battle flag as the "Confederate
swastika"--all of which make him a useful figurehead for SPLC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Bond
Bond would seem to have little input and impact on the Center's
management and direction, and, as with other civil rights leaders who
had burned out or otherwise lost credibility, serves as little more
than a figurehead.
Director, Intelligence Project Mark Potok
Mark Potok, who is also editor of SPLC's periodical Intelligence
Project, has overseen the Center's vaunted research on "hate groups"
and "hate crimes" during the dozen years (1997-present) he has worked
for the Center.
Potok, who left the University of Chicago without graduating over
thirty years ago, would seem to have little academic or practical
experience to qualify him as an expert on dissident groups and
ideologies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-potok
Potok's special expertise--tabloid-style emotionalism and "branding"
through well-couched smear or deft innuendo--builds on his twenty-year
career as a journalist (USA Today, the Dallas Times Herald, and the
Miami Herald), during which he covered the Oklahoma City bombing and
the militias. His skill with shrill and lurid verbiage, joined to
SPLC's techniques for discerning "links and ties" (what was called
"guilt by association" when practiced by Sen. Joseph McCarthy), has
imbued the Center's invective with a new urgency fed by classic yellow
journalism as well as the take-no-prisoners zeal of the classic
extremist. Potok's attacks on mainstream figures who have dared to
differ with the Center are just as revealing: to cite a representative
instance, in SPLC's blog he called the combative conservative
columnist Ann Coulter "rabid" and her book Guilty a "foaming-mouth
tome."
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/02/13/columnist-ann-coulter-defends-white-supremacist-group/
Potok has admitted that SPLC's methodology has been suspect: he stated
that the Center's "number counts for ["hate groups"] initially weren't
very reliable" (while failing to explain why current counts are any
more trustworthy [see below]).
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/593/593_07_MarkPotok.shtml
Potok has conceded that only a tiny minority of "hate crimes" is
carried out by "hate groups," but implied that such groups influence
"hate crimes" offenders. He has also claimed that the FBI reports well
under 10 percent of all "hate crimes" committed.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5506152
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=195
In line with SPLC practice, Potok has concentrated on white,
right-wing, "nativist," and domestic "hate groups." to the practical
exclusion of nonwhite, left-wing, and foreign ones (see "Hate Groups"
below). Under his leadership, the Center's Intelligence Project has
strained to exaggerate the domestic terror threat from the right and
to minimize the danger of imported Islamist terror, a position that
the 9/11 attacks (carried out by aliens, many here illegally) have
made much less tenable. Potok has praised a recent Department of
Homeland Security report that, thanks in great part to SPLC's input,
was so focused on lawful and law-abiding groups (including returning
U.S. combat veterans) that it had to be disavowed; he has whined about
the FBI dragging its feet on 60 "major" terrorist plots (while
disregarding their work on radical Muslim plots).
http://24ahead.com/s/mark-potok
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/593/593_07_MarkPotok.shtml
In a revealing admission, Potok recently stated that it is the
immigration control movement (which he called "a rush of people
identifying with a nation-state and its borders") itself, here and in
Europe, rather than "hate groups" as such, that concerns SPLC.
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/593/593_07_MarkPotok.shtml
Not much is available through the Internet on Potok's life and
ideological background. He is evidently married and has adopted a
child.
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcript/?content=20070621
He has given cordial interviews to at least two hard-core communist
periodicals, the Trotskyite Socialist Worker and the People's Weekly
World (formerly the American Communist Party's Daily Worker); similar
links with dissident groups on the right have been invoked by Potok as
proof of shared sympathies.
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/593/593_07_MarkPotok.shtml
http://www.peoplesworld.org/reform-blocked-by-racist-groups/
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=981
Sources for Potok's radicalism may include his Jewish heritage "...let
me state for the record that most of my father's side of the family
died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz" and his unprepossessing looks.
More laborious research might uncover hidden leftist, if not
communist, associations from his university days.
http://www.tomjoad.org/stopthejdl.htm
http://www.radiofreesilver.com/grfx/ncmr_08/mark_potok.jpg