FC: A close look at Southern Poverty Law Center and "hate groups"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Of particular relevance to Politech, perhaps, is that the SPLC has been 
very active in denouncing "hate groups" using the Internet:
http://search.wired.com/news/default.asp?query=southern%20poverty%20law%20center

I haven't looked into the SPLC much myself, but I believe Ken Silverstein 
to be a careful reporter (and, of course, the Counterpunch folks are 
well-represented on Politech).

-Declan

---

From: "William K. Dobbs" <duchamp () mindspring com>
Subject: Southern "Poverty' Law Center -- $120 Million cash cow
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 11:41:36 -0400
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It seems every few months another letter arrives from the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC), wanting to know if I'll give money to have my name on
their Wall of Tolerance or somesuch.  In this article from Harper's
Magazine, Ken Silverstein takes one of SPLC's fundraising letters and
annotates it, producing a revealing and devastating critique.  The
well-known group may have 'poverty' in the name but it has apparently
accumulated a staggering fortune, more than $120 million in the kitty.
According to Silverstein, the American Institute of Philanthropy gives SPLC
one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors.

SPLC's perfidy has gone on for many years.  Cognoscenti like Silverstein,
Alexander Cockburn and others have shined a spotlight on this but still the
SPLC direct-mail machine rolls onward.  Was it P.T. Barnum who said there's
a fool born every minute?  Besides arming yourself and others with knowledge
about SPLC -- and encouraging money to flow to those groups and individuals
who are more serious about social change -- there is at least one small
measure of accountability.  Because SPLC is a tax-exempt non-profit
operation it is required to make public some information about its
activities.  Here is a link to SPLC's latest IRS Form 990 with more
information about the group's wad of cash, high salaries paid to executives
including Morris Dees, and the names of the board of directors who bear
responsibility for SPLC's operations:
http://www.guidestar.com/pdf/2000/630/598/2000-630598743-1-9.pdf .

-Bill Dobbs

Note:  this plain-text e-mail is not as graphic as the Harper's Magazine
original which featured a reproduction of the SPLC letter; Silverstein's
annotations were accompanied by arrows to various passages in the letter.
In the digitized version, below, the text of the letter comes first.  You
may wish to scroll down directly to Silverstein's annotations.


Harper's Magazine
November, 2000

The Church of Morris Dees

How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance

by Ken Silverstein


Southern Poverty Law Center fundraising letter:

TEACHING TOLERANCE* (see Note A, below)

America is deeply divided along racial and other lines.
Now there is a unique program to help students bridge this gap.

Dear Ms. C___,

Please use the enclosed "Tolerance Challenge" personalized labels.  Help
make this a year of retreat from the bigotry and prejudice that now afflict
our nation.

You can do this by joining an exciting and successful project called
TEACHING TOLERANCE and using the enclosed address labels on letters you
mail.

Newsweek Magazine calls TEACHING TOLERANCE "a winner [among] programs
providing moral education..."

The President's Initiative on Race recognized TEACHING TOLERANCE as one of
the most effective "efforts that are successfully bridging racial divides in
communities across America."

Your free "Teach Tolerance" address labels are only a small part of a very
big nationwide project.  Over 80,000 schools are now using TEACHING
TOLERANCE materials to educate nearly 20,000,000 students about caring,
sharing and tolerance.

One of the teachers who uses TEACHING TOLERANCE materials sent us the
enclosed note entitled "Lessons from the Tears of a Child."

In it she tells about a child in her classroom who suffered from the racist
acts of other students.  Then, after a moving story* (see Note C, below)
that may bring tears to your eyes, she quotes the words of Gandhi:

"If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with
children."

Many others agree.

Bill Moyers said:  "TEACHING TOLERANCE is a bold move into America's
classrooms to curb the rising tide of racial tension and violence.…Those of
us who care about the quality of our society must take steps to assure that
organizations like the Center and the TEACHING TOLERANCE project thrive."

You may know TEACHING TOLERANCE's film A Time for Justice won an Oscar for
Best Short Documentary.  This winning video is part of an education kit, a
$325 value* (see Note D, below) that is sent absolutely free to any school
on request.

Barbara Jordan wrote:  "I add my personal endorsement [of TEACHING
TOLERANCE] as an educator and as one long involved in teaching harmony and
tolerance.  This project gives you and me a rare opportunity to tackle
intolerance head on."

I am sure you are well aware that our schools are racked with racial strife
and intolerance against those who are different.  Some call it a national
crisis.

Our communities are seething with racial violence.  African Americans,
Caucasians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans* (see Note E,
below) are assaulting each other.  Gays are bashed and interracial couples
harassed.

In Jasper, Texas, three white men, two described as "Ku Klux Klan
supporters"* (see Note B, below) by the local District Attorney, dragged a
black man to his death behind their pickup truck.

In Los Angeles, a neo-Nazi tried to kill as many children as possible at a
Jewish community center.

Experts predict things could get worse, both in our schools and in our
communities.  There is no single solution to this crisis.  We believe that
TEACHING TOLERANCE is a step in the right direction.  And we are not along
in this view.

A Minnesota teacher wrote:  "Your TEACHING TOLERANCE program is wonderful.
Maybe the kids of today will grow up to be the color-blind adults of
tomorrow.  Not only color-blind, but prejudice-free of anyone who might be a
different religion, race, or creed than they are."

The idea for TEACHING TOLERANCE originated with the Southern Poverty Law
Center in Montgomery and quickly spread across the nation.  Nationally known
educators like Robert Coles of Harvard and groups like the National
Education Association lent their assistance.

And nearly half a million people like you* (see Note F, below) have joined
in the effort and are providing the financial support for this nonprofit
project.  I invite you to be a part of TEACHING TOLERANCE.

This is how TEACHING TOLERANCE works:

1. Top-quality teaching kits are produced for grades K through 12.  These
boxed kits contain a video, text and teacher's guide.

2. These teaching kits are shipped free to any school on request.

3. A journal called Teaching Tolerance, filled with articles, facts, and
resources, is sent free in the fall and spring to over 600,000 teachers.

TEACHING TOLERANCE works because the education kits it produces, along with
the semiannual teacher magazine, are creative, top-quality and easy to use
by today's busy teachers.

In only nine years, TEACHING TOLERANCE has won numerous awards.  I'll
mention just three:

An Oscar
A Time for Justice, the 38-minute video in the first TEACHING TOLERANCE kit,
won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary.

Golden Eagle Award
Starting Small, the video in Teaching Tolerance's third education kit, was
awarded a Golden Eagle for excellence by CINE (Council on International
Nontheatrical Events)

EdPress Golden Lamp Award
Teaching Tolerance magazine won the top award from the Educational Press
Association of America, an independent association of some 700 educational
periodicals.

Also, as I mentioned at the start of my letter, the work of TEACHING
TOLERANCE was singled out for praise by the President's Initiative on Race.

You need to see the TEACHING TOLERANCE materials to understand why they
receive so much praise from educators and why they keep winning award after
award.  If you will join me in helping fund TEACHING TOLERANCE, I will see
that you receive a copy of Teaching Tolerance magazine.  You can judge for
yourself its usefulness and quality, and then pass it on to a school in your
area or to a family member.

There is much left to do in the TEACHING TOLERANCE program.  It is time
everyone joined in the war against intolerance.  We need your help now.

So far, TEACHING TOLERANCE has produced three video-and-text education kits
for classrooms.  These kits cost* (see Note H, below) over $1 million each
to produce and distribute free.  Starting Small, our newest kit, is for
elementary teachers and is being distributed right now. We expect at least
60,000 schools to request free Starting Small kits and we must be able to
fill these orders.

A Texas teacher told us: "We could never have purchased the TEACHING
TOLERANCE education package because our budget is alarmingly small. We are
therefore extremely grateful that TEACHING TOLERANCE provided this material
to us free of charge."

Our editors are also busy preparing the next issue of Teaching Tolerance
magazine with its 64 pages of colorful and useful text. Each issue costs
about $376,000 to produce and mail.  Any teacher can subscribe free of
charge.

Please don't sit on the sidelines while the battle for our nation's ability
to live in peace and tolerance is being waged.  Show you are behind TEACHING
TOLERANCE by using your "Teach Tolerance" address labels.

And join me and thousands of others in this important endeavor by sending
the most generous tax-deductible gift you can today.

Your gift of $25, $50, $100 - whatever you can afford - will help TEACHING
TOLERANCE reach even more classrooms and will help the Center carry on its
other important work* (see Note G, below) for justice.

Sincerely,

Morris Dees* (see Note I, below)
National Chairman

MD:he

P.S.  Ms. C___, help spread the tolerance message by using your personalized
address labels on all your correspondence.  And remember, you will receive a
free Teaching Tolerance magazine soon after your tax-deductible contribution
arrives.

---

ANNOTATIONS BY KEN SILVERSTEIN

Note 'A'

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 antideath-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 programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in
the country.

Note 'B'

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
historyand one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was
never credibly linked to any militia organization.

Note 'C'

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.
11 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.

Note 'D'

Any good salesman knows that a product's "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.

Note 'E'

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.

Note 'F'

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 fundraising." 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
wellmeaning "people like you."

Note 'G'

The SPLC's "other important work for 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."

Note 'H'

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.

Note 'I'

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.

-------

Ken Silverstein is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and the author
of Private Warriors, an investigation of the arms trade published last
August by Verso.




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