Harper's
Magazine, November 2000
The Church of Morris
Dees
By Ken Silverstein
How the
Southern Poverty Law Center profits from
intolerance
AH, tolerance. Who could be against
something so virtuous? And who could object to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery,
Alabama-based group that recently sent out this
heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money
for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares
educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by
civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire
Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and
a man so beatific that he was the subject of a
made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years
defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing
to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's
highway patrol. That was then.
Today, the SPLC spends most of its time -- and money
-- on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling
memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal
of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's
the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights
movement," renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard
Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I
don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." The Center
earned $44 million last year alone -- $27 million from
fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other
investments -- but spent only $13 million on civil rights
program , making it one of the most profitable charities
in the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis,
has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an
estimated 2,000 today, as
many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI
informants. But news of a declining Klan does not
make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co.,
which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally
covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of
nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary
forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees
does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic
villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard
Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news
cameras.
In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the
United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae
Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The
UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale
netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking
series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery
Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from
fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including
one containing a photo of Michael Donald's
corpse.
Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit
almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate
crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters
cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are
perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy
McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive
investigations in the FBI's history -- and one of the
most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's -- was
never credibly linked to any militia organization.
No faith healing or infomercial would be complete
without a moving testimonial. The student from whose
tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is
identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are
assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the
specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor
the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters,
in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating
tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of
his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film
that had distorted my white perspective of the world."
Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this
schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will
she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the
world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of
acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and
Clinton, empathy -- or the confession thereof -- is an
end in itself.
Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a
highly mutable quality with little relation to actual
worth, and Morris Dees -- who made millions hawking, by
direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes,
cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home
Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison,
and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000
names, presidential candidate George McGovern -- is
nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in
1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into
its Hall of Fame. "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." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author)
masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of
hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30
on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
This is one of the only places in this letter where
specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his
copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and
vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive
issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as
angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors
are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues
like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get
"communities seething with racial violence." Instead of
racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity
between poor predominantly black schools and affluent
white ones, or the violence against illegals along the
Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against
those who are different," turning bigotry into a
color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to
know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of
this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native
Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees,
we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential
contributors.
MORRIS DEES doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC
is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America,
though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other
solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One
pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60
million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the
"strain on our current operating budget is the greatest
in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the Center
had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his
organization would quit fund-raising and live off
interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as
it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100
million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would
allow the Center "to cease the costly and often
unreliable task of fund raising. " Today, 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. The
American Institute of Philanthropy gives 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 SPLC's "other important work justice" consists
mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate
groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies,
and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes
committed independently by their members-a practice that,
however seemingly justified, should give civil
libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees
could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or
bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in
retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown.
What the Center's other work for justice does not include
is anything that might be considered controversial by
donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely
stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too
visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare
off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center's entire
legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address
issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and
affirmative action-that they considered far more
pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to
affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another
lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years
later, told reporters that the Center's programs were
calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt."
Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership
consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an
affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably
the most discriminated people in America today are white
men when it comes to jobs."
Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised
to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational
spending actually goes to education. In response to
lobbying by charities, the American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing
nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as
"educational" so long as their solicitations contained an
informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies
an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that
it sends out every year as educational, including many
that do little more than instruct potential donors on the
many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the
many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax
documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending
the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to
solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines
honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law
while the civil rights movement engulfed the South.
"Morris and I...shared the overriding purpose of making a
pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer
named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard
Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we
just wanted to be independently rich." They were so
unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man,
guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom
Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt
the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees
later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that
nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965,
Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity,
and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a
200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and
stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his
compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising
revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000
last year.
A National Journal survey of salaries paid to
the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees
earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight
listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such
groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The
more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other
civil rights organizations, many of which, including the
NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's
compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual
budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human
Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a
year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern
Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996
letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons
for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond
to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless
despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising
techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish
so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly." Soon the
SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in
downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its
current headquarters, a building known locally as the
Poverty Palace.
[Original URL: http://www.texasls.org/articles/reading_room/church_of_morris_dees.htm]
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Also see: Intolerance Identified -- Morris Dees &
The Southern Poverty Law Center: The Laissez Faire
City Times, Vol 4, No 50, December 11, 2000
"This man [Morris Dees] works to gain the
trust of young people by displaying the evils of admitted
racist organizations that have a tiny number of
adherents. Mr. Dees then proceeds to propagate the notion
that conservative organizations -- particularly those
that are pro-gun or anti-government -- pose the same
dangers, and thus, must be impeded."
write
to David Irving