Morris Dees

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is the founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). He founded the Center in 1971, the start of a legal career dedicated to suing what they consider hate groups and pursuing controversial cases.

1 Biography
2 Criticism
- 2.1 Montgomery Advertiser investigation
3 Published books
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

After graduation from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama and opened a law office. He ran a book publishing business, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, which grew to become a successful company in its own right. After what Dees described in his autobiography as "a night of soul searching at a snowed-in Cincinnati airport" in 1967, he sold the company in 1969 to Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. He used the revenue generated by the sale to found the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971.

Dees' new legal firm began taking part in civil rights cases that frequently put him in the spotlight. He filed suit to stop construction of a white university in an Alabama city that already had a predominantly black state college. Then in 1969, he filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA.

Dees' most famous cases have involved landmark damage awards that have driven several prominent neo-Nazi groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband and re-organize under different names and different leaders. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and won a seven million dollar settlement.^[1] In a 1987 case against the United Klans of America, he won a $ 7 million judgment for the mother of Michael Donald, a black lynching victim in Alabama.^[1] This was topped a decade later, when in 1991 he won a judgment of $12 million against Tom Metzger White Aryan Resistance.^[1] He was also instrumental in the rewarding of a $6.5 million judgment against Aryan Nations in 2001, which splintered that group as well.

In 1972, Dees was the finance director for Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. He also served as President Jimmy Carter's national finance director in 1976, and as national finance chairman for Senator Ted Kennedy's 1980 Democratic primary presidential campaign against Carter.

The story of Dees' crusade against white supremacist hate groups was fictionalized in a 1991 TV movie entitled Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story.

Dees ran for the board of the Sierra Club as a protest candidate in 2004, qualifying by petition. His sole purpose in running was to use his ballot statement to encourage club members not to vote for three of the candidates, including Richard Lamm, because of their views on immigration. Dees received 7554 votes, coming in 16th out of 17 candidates in the election despite requesting no votes and carrying out no campaign.

[edit] Criticism

Dees' tactics and legal actions against racial nationalist groups have made him a target of criticism from many of these organizations. He has allegedly received numerous death threats from these groups, and a number of hate web sites make strong accusations against him and the Southern Poverty Law Center. At one time there existed a web site dedicated to gathering "dirt" on Dees, entitled "Deeswatch," though it is apparently now defunct.

While the actions of the SPLC against racist and hate groups have won considerable praise and accolades for Dees, he has also been subjected to criticism for the legal tactics used in obtaining these judgements, which enforce the idea that neo-Nazi groups are subject to "guilt by association," rather than from direct involvement in violent hate crimes.

Renowned anti-death penalty lawyer Millard Farmer, has been quoted Harper's Magazine, November 2000 as remarking that Dees "is the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement...though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye".

Dees labeled the League of the South as “racist” and “terrorist” in publications put out by his Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and public statements.

[edit] Montgomery Advertiser investigation

Morris Dees and the SPLC were the subject of a 1994 investigative report by the Montgomery Advertiser. Dees and his organization lobbied against the report's consideration for journalistic awards, but it was a finalist for a 1995 Pulitzer Prize.[1] Jim Tharpe, the editor of the Advertiser at that time, recounts Dees' campaign:

"The other point is, when this was nominated for a Pulitzer, Morris Dees, who is one of the great fundraisers for a lot of political figures in the country, mobilized some of the best-known and probably most liberal politicians in the country for whom he had raised money and they lobbied the Pulitzer Board against this series, the first lobbying that I know of that kind, and without knowing anything about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s activities they were lobbying the Pulitzer Board not to recognize this work."[2]

[edit] Published books

A Season For Justice, Dees' autobiography, published in 1991. Reprinted in 2001 as A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story.

Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, 1996.

Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, 1993. It chronicles the trial and $12.5 million judgment against white supremacist Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance group for their responsibility in the beating death of a young black student in Portland, Oregon.