A Resource For Information on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

'The SPLC's primary purpose is not litigation, however, but the pressuring of public opinion. And its "education" is on the order of Joe, the fat boy in Dickens' Pickwick Papers, who says, "I wants to make your flesh creep."'

'Dear Morris Dees,

You've made yourself a national reputation as a fighter against hate groups. Recently, however, you released a report called "Into the Mainstream" by a leftwing conspiracy theorist named Chip Berlet, which purports to show how "right wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable." This report is so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself.'

'Stephen Bright of the Southern Center of Human Rights, an Atlanta- based anti-death-penalty group, calls Dees "a fraud and a con man" who has "milked a lot of very wonderful, well-intentioned people."

A scathing article in the November 2000 Harper's Magazine quoted one critic who called Dees the "Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement." The article charged that SPLC relies on emotional pleas that suggest the organization is under terrible financial stress, skirting the fact that SPLC is the wealthiest civil rights group in America.'

The appearance of American Border Patrol (ABP), a non-profit corporation formed to tell the truth about the border situation, has gotten the attention of a well-know smear artist, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). According to Glenn Spencer, president of ABP, "The SPLC has descended on Cochise county like locusts, eating the truth wherever they can find it." Spencer says SPLC has joined forces with Isabel Garcia of Derechos Humanos to defeat any attempt to stop Mexicans from invading the United States.

The cover story for the winter, 2001 edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s quarterly "Intelligence Report," which is "free for law enforcement only," claims that 10 years after the passage of the federal hate crimes act, hate crime statistics do not add up. If law enforcement depends upon intelligence provided by the SPLC to tally hate crimes in the U.S., we may have our first clues as to how hate crimes are so scandalously underreported.

'What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing instead? Mostly making money. I would never have suggested that it "devote[s] all [its] resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations," because the center doesn't devote all of its resources to any kind of fight. In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million--$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments. A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for "excessive" reserves.'

'Then we get the dirty little secret of hate-crime reporting. "Horrifying as such incidents are," writes Mr. Silverstein, "hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all 'hate crimes,' including most of the incidents [Mr. Dees] cites (bombings, church burnings, school shootings) are perpetrated by 'lone wolves.' " Indeed, membership in the Ku Klux Klan, which is the most lucrative Dees fund-raising target, has shrunk so dramatically that the Klan would have been out of business years ago but for FBI infiltration. In some chapters the only members with paid-up dues are FBI informants.'

'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."'

'The ill-named SPLC was founded by lawyer and direct-mail expert Morris Seligman Dees to raise money for the ostensible purpose of financing litigation against Politically Incorrect groups and individuals as a way of harassing them. The SPLC's fund-raising activity has been very successful.... Mr. Dees' announced goal is $100 million.'

'Moreover, the SPLC campaigns for laws that will effectively deny free speech and freedom of association to certain groups of Americans on the basis of their beliefs. Six times a year, the SPLC's letter boasts, the center reports its findings to over 6,000 law-enforcement agencies; then, with no discernible irony, it goes on to justify its Big Brother methods in the name of tolerance:' arguing that "paranoid militant groups" are seeking protection from "imagined threats" to their freedoms.'

'Gloria Browne, a lawyer who's worked with Dees' outfit, once told the Montgomery Advertiser that the Southern Poverty Law Center trades in "black pain and white guilt." He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil rights movement.'

For the past several years, the Major Media has portrayed Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center as an "expert" on terrorism, militias, and the Patriot Movement.
Is Morris Dees a trustworthy and truthful source of information, on a subject so dear to the American people as their liberties?
Decide for yourself after reading the following court document. This was forwarded to me by email several years ago. I make no claim as to it's authenticity... Research the facts for yourself. I merely reproduce it here in the public interest.