On March 14, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the left-liberal civil rights nonprofit group known for its conspicuous wealth and ever-expanding lists of right-wing “hate” figures and organizations, abruptly fired 82-year-old Morris Dees. Dees, an Alabama lawyer, is the man who founded the SPLC in Montgomery in 1971 and built it into a fundraising powerhouse with assets approaching $500 million. Not long after his departure, President Richard Cohen and legal director Rhonda Brownstein, both of whom have been at the center since 1986, resigned.
The SPLC hasn’t said much about the three departures, especially that of Dees, whose profile, though not photos, it scrubbed from its website. News media reported allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination that had circulated on in-house emails. New female members of staff had allegedly been warned repeatedly about overtures from the five-times-married Dees. The SPLC’s highest-ranking black woman, senior attorney Meredith Horton, had resigned, and according to the Los Angeles Times, other female staffers had signed letters protesting office mistreatment and discrimination. Cohen issued a statement implying that Dees had failed to meet the SPLC’s “standards” of “truth, justice, equity and inclusion.” Dees denies any wrongdoing. Cohen’s March 22 resignation email stated, “Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them.”
The SPLC’s extraordinarily lucrative business model, designed by Dees, depends on aggressive direct mailings and relentless publicity directed at whatever conservative bogeymen could be used to evoke liberal panic and liberal dollars: Ku Klux Klan kleagles, gun nuts, survivalists, white supremacists, Aryan nationalists, and, most recently, Donald Trump supporters. Its collapse was, perhaps, inevitable. A March 21 article in the New Yorker by former SPLC staffer Bob Moser described it as “in many respects, a highly profitable scam” that pulled in tens of millions of dollars annually but did little in the way of actual poverty law.
Dees, born in 1936 to a farm family in Tucker, Ala., demonstrated an early knack for mixing high-minded activism with cementing a comfortable lifestyle for himself and those associated with him. His 1991 autobiography, A Season for Justice, described “the pulls and tugs of my conscience” to fight for civil rights. Except that, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, Dees spent most of his time growing a direct-mail marketing business that he’d started at college, selling everything from doormats to cookbooks. He sold this business in 1969, making himself a multimillionaire. He had a flair for Manichean political prose; he had worked as a volunteer for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, raising some $24 million in donations. His reward was McGovern’s mailing list of idealistic, well-heeled white liberals, whom he promptly soaked to finance the fledgling SPLC.
[Related: Southern Poverty Law Center roiled as second founder resigns]
During the 1970s, the SPLC won significant civil rights victories, such as the racial integration of Alabama’s state troopers and a state redistricting that allowed blacks to win legislative seats in Alabama for the first time. By the 1980s, however, Dees was redirecting the center’s litigation away from those classic civil rights issues and related liberal causes, such as the death penalty, and instead focused on the Ku Klux Klan. He pioneered a legal strategy known as “damage litigation” that entailed suing the klan and other white supremacist organizations for violence by their members, putting those organizations out of business with devastating court-assessed damages.
By the 1980s, the klan was moribund, down to about 5,000 members, most of them politically and economically marginal, but few Northern liberals on the SPLC’s mailing lists seemed aware of that. One of the SPLC’s most striking legal victories was a 1987 award of $7 million to the mother of a young black man who had been murdered by two klansmen. She saw very little of the money, for the sole asset of the klansmen was a rundown warehouse in Tuscaloosa that netted just $51,875 in a forced sale. No matter, Dees’ mailings publicizing that lawsuit generated $9 million in donations for the SPLC, according to a 1995 Pulitzer-nominated series about the center in the Montgomery Advertiser. Meanwhile, in 1981, the SPLC had formed an educational and publications unit called Klanwatch that would mark the beginning of its “hate groups” focus. It was highly effective at generating donations. Its fundraising letters warned of “neo-Nazi terrorism unparalleled in this decade,” and they were sometimes signed by McGovern, Ethel Kennedy, novelist Toni Morrison, and other celebrities.
The shift raised some progressive eyebrows. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire staff of lawyers quit, distressed by Dees’ obsessive focus on the klan at the expense of what they said were more pressing civil rights issues. It was at this juncture that Cohen and Brownstein joined the center. The 1995 Advertiser series claimed the center spent only 31 percent of its revenues on program services such as litigation and public education. Its net assets had grown to $52 million by then. By 2000 it more than doubled, to $120 million, and Ken Silverstein, writing in Harper’s magazine, pointed out that there was almost no connection between the “hate groups” the SPLC relentlessly publicized and actual hate crimes, nearly all of which were committed by lone wolves. For example, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was never credibly connected to any militia group. Writing in 2009 for the leftist magazine CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn accused the SPLC of using the election of President Barack Obama to raise the specter of “millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.” By 2011 the SPLC’s assets had more than doubled again, to $256 million. The center’s most recent audited financial statement, for the fiscal year ending Oct. 18, 2018, shows total net assets of $471 million.
This massive, unspent hoard, relative to the mere $53 million the SPLC reported it spent on program services in its 2017 tax return, has led CharityWatch, an independent philanthropy watchdog, to give the center a grade of “F” year after year. Tax-exempt nonprofit groups are theoretically supposed to spend the lion’s share of contributions on the stated charitable purposes that inspired the donations, and CharityWatch downgrades charities that stockpile more than three years’ worth of operating expenses. For the SPLC in 2017, this totaled $22 million, about half of which was spent on fundraising. CharityWatch also noted that the center spends 39 percent of its cash budget on overhead. The SPLC says it’s closer to 29 percent. CharityWatch also says it spends $25 to raise every $100, but the SPLC says the figure is closer to $19.
[Opinion: The Southern Poverty Law Center is a ‘scam’]
There are other oddities in the SPLC’s ever-expanding endowment. In 2018, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the center had $92 million parked offshore in such havens as the Cayman Islands, with lax transparency requirements. That amount has apparently grown to $121 million. The center’s financial statement for the 2018 fiscal year indicates that some 84 percent of the center’s net assets are in what are known as “alternative investments” — hedge funds, private equity, collectibles — that, unlike cash or publicly traded securities, can’t be easily valued or liquidated and are often considered risky. This is a “definitely extraordinary percentage” for a nonprofit group, said Christopher D. Renner, grants and accounting manager at DonorsTrust, which handles grants to conservative foundations. The usual amount of alternative investments for a public-interest law firm “is more like 8 to 12 percent,” Renner explained.
Trump’s election in 2016 was a fundraising bonanza for the SPLC, even more than Obama’s was. In 2017, after Trump took office, the center’s contributions from distraught liberals soared to $120 million, compared to the $46 million it had raised in 2016, with comparable amounts in preceding years. Actor George Clooney’s charitable foundation donated $1 million when a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 turned deadly.
The center also revved up its fervid and lucrative preoccupation with “hate.” A recent SPLC graph purports to depict a steady 30 percent increase in the number of American hate groups, from 784 in 2014 to a record 1,020 in 2018. This is because of what the SPLC claims is a “rising tide” of Trump-era white animosity. Its new interactive “hate map” allows users to track hate from Maine, which contains 5 hate groups, to California, which has 83 groups. For several months after Trump’s election, the New York Times ran a feature titled “This Week in Hate,” consisting of reports supplied by the SPLC and others of swastikas painted on walls and Muslims derided as terrorists. Many of the reports could not be corroborated or were proved to be false. The SPLC also entered into working partnerships with Amazon, Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Twitter to police their platforms for alleged hate and blacklist what it considered objectionable. Some of the organizations the SPLC defined as hate groups are simply Christian advocacy entities, such as Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, the latter of which represented Christian baker Jack Phillips in his successful Supreme Court battle against being forced to design a cake for a gay wedding. The SPLC has branded such figures as conservative political scientist Charles Murray, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who is black, and Somali-born women’s-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as haters, alongside the Aryan Brotherhood. In June 2018, the SPLC settled for $3 million and an apology from Cohen in response to a defamation claim by Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz for including him in the SPLC’s A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Other individuals and groups that believe they have been maligned by the center are considering lawsuits.
The SPLC reportedly has about 350 employees that work at its Montgomery headquarters and satellite offices in four other Southern states, raising the question of what exactly all those people are doing for their paychecks. The center did not respond to my requests for answers to these and other questions. Critics say that, aside from a few high-profile cases, the center’s actual legal work seemed desultory. In response, it has recently beefed up its roster of attorneys to about 80 and increased its lawsuit filings and their political visibility.
Nonetheless, the SPLC’s work, as opposed to its profile, seems thin. Of its 29 “active” cases filed since January 2016, only about a dozen appear to involve the center doing all or the primary legal work. In its highest-profile cases, a 2017 challenge to Trump’s “travel ban” denying visas to residents of terrorism-beset countries and a 2019 challenge to a Trump administration policy of making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for resolution of their claims, for example, the SPLC has piggybacked on other people’s work by adding its name and lawyers’ signatures to complaints led by the American Civil Liberties Union or large law firms doing pro bono work. Other SPLC cases involve shooting fish in a barrel. A 2018 suit over the detention of juveniles charged with felonies in Louisiana was filed the day after the state Senate voted 33-0 to correct the problem. A few weeks later, the Louisiana House approved the bill by a 96-0 vote, and it became law. In 2016, the SPLC sued Louisiana over archaic obstacles to voter registration by naturalized citizens, put in place in 1874; less than a month later, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a repeal. A 2017 Florida suit, R.W. v. Kiser, took the case of a 17-year-old boy allegedly raped and beaten in a Florida prison while a guard looked on and did nothing. Ten months later, the case was settled with the guard agreeing to pay a mere $60,000 in damages while the state of Florida and its correctional agency, which had never been sued, were released from liability.
A current SPLC suit is vintage Dees, seeking punitive and other damages against Andrew Anglin, owner of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, for allegedly doxxing and harassing a Jewish real estate agent who had dealings with the mother of another white supremacist, Richard Spencer. Anglin has no fixed address and faces lawsuits by others, so it is unclear how much the allegedly harassed agent, Tanya Gersh, will ever collect from him should she win her case.
In the wake of its recent shake-up, the SPLC has hired Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, to lead a “top-to-bottom review” of racial and gender discrimination in its offices. But the bigger victory would be when someone finally gets to grips with the way Dees turned the cause of Southern civil rights into a self-perpetuating money machine. It’s a vested interest that has followed the time-honored path of starting as a movement, turning into a business, and finally metastasizing into a racket.
[Also read: Southern Poverty declares war on Trump, with Michelle Obama aide’s help]
Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to First Things, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
