[Vision2020] Southern Poverty Law Center-article

[Douglas]

Visionaries,

Harper's? Isn't that a newsletter edited by a couple of peckerwoods out of 
East Toad Flats, Arkansas?

Cordially,

Douglas Wilson


At 01:29 PM 10/27/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>I think you may have a too-simplistic view of what makes the SPLC tick. 
>The following article from Harper's is illuminating.
>     TL
>
>
>By Ken Silverstein -- Harper's Magazine, November 2000
>
>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 
><http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/kkk-5.htm> . 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 af! firmative 
>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 Education! al 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.
>
>
>DonaldH675@aol.com wrote:
>Dear Visionaries,
>Is the budget of the Southern Poverty Law Center or the fact that their 
>central office is "all the way across the country" relevant to this 
>discussion?  I think not.  The SPLC exists because Morris Dees, and his 
>staff provide legal assistance to folks still struggling with that 
>aftermath of the glorious, God blessed, paternalistic, slave-holding (and 
>lest you have forgotten Doug, slave trading) system so opportunistically 
>defended by Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins. I say opportunistically because 
>they must have identified an audience to justify their literary 
>efforts....mostly named Bubba, who fly Confederate flags on the radio 
>antennas and live in Sump Pump, Alabama....or Hayden Lake refugees who 
>have recently migrated to the Montana mountains.
>Perhaps Doug Jones would share with us how many copies of this little gem 
>have been sold....and did League of the South members get a special discount?
>Rose Huskey
>
>
>
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