The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

Article author: 
Bob Moser
Article publisher: 
The New Yorker
Article date: 
22 March 2019
Article category: 
National News
Medium
Article Body: 

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 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 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...

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves... We were part of the con, and we knew it.

“The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say...

Related

Good news! Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees, Montgomery Advertiser, March 15, 2019.

SPLC Implodes: President And Legal Director Resign Amid Sexual Misconduct Scandal, Zero Hedge, March 23, 2019:

A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims - with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism," the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization's legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday....

Learn more about the SPLC - Southern Poverty Law Center hate group

Morris Dees Fact Sheet, Originally published by The Patriotist.

Morris Dees background information, Discover the Networks.

Morris Dees Personal Information, references and video compiled by The Social Contract.

Southern Poverty Surpasses Half Billion in Assets; $121 Million Now Offshore, Washington Free Beacon, March 14, 2019.