From “The Church of Morris Dees,” in the November 2000 issue of Harpers magazine (authored by Ken Silverstein):
“Today the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] 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 [Morris] 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 programs, making itone of the most profitable charities in the country.”“Morris Dees — who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks, 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 fac that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame.”
“Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America . . . . one [fund-raising] 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.”
“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.'”
“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 Deese’s business parner . . . . 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.”
“Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights.”
“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.”
8:40 am on January 25, 2005
