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Morris Dees

Morris Dees Boston 2015 (link) by Tim Pierce is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (link)
Nationality:

American
Born:

1936
Occupation:

Attorney

Co-Founder and Former Chief Trial Counsel, Southern Poverty Law Center

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Morris Dees is the co-founder and former chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Dees was involved with the SPLC for 48 years and grew the organization into one of the largest civil rights organizations in the United States. The SPLC bankrupted numerous prominent extremist organizations including the United Klans of America and the Aryan Nations.

Dees was known for using his prior career in direct marketing to grab headlines and launch successful fundraising efforts until the SPLC had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Dees also successfully ran the fundraising operations of four Democratic presidential candidates.

In 2019, Dees was let go from the SPLC. Soon after, it was revealed that a significant portion of the organization’s staff had turned against Dees after years of alleged sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and workplace hostility.

In 2020, Dees was linked with The Association for Responsible Gun Owners (TARGO), an anti-National Rifle Association (NRA) project of the Justice Center of America. 1

Background and Family

Dees was born in 1936 in Shorter, Alabama to a family of tenant farmers who eventually acquired 110 acres of land. Dees’s family had fought for the Confederates in the Civil War, and his maternal grandfather was a member of the Klu Klux Klan. Dees’s mother rejected her father’s beliefs and helped Black field hands fill out welfare applications. 2

As a child, Dees worked on the family farm alongside Black field hands. He graduated valedictorian from junior high and then attended a vocational high school where he met Beverly Crum. When they were both 19, the two married. They had two children before divorcing in 1968. 2

Dees attended the University of Alabama for his undergraduate and law degrees while the university underwent government-mandated desegregation. Though initially indifferent to the process, Dees became sympathetic to the civil rights movement after witnessing a Black student being harassed and then learning of the murder of Emmett Till. 2

In college, Dees launched numerous entrepreneurial ventures, including real estate and compiling student telephone books. 3 He found his first success when he started a fruitcake company called ‘Bama Birthday Cake Service. Millard Fuller, a fellow student, joined the business initially as an employee and later became a business partner. In 1957, Dees ran for county delegate but dropped out of the race. He was offered a job as assistant attorney general to the Democratic attorney general, but Dees declined. 2

Law Career and Activism

After graduating from law school, Dees and Fuller bought and sold real estate in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1958, they opened a law partnership in Mount Meigs, where Dees’s family had purchased land. 2

In 1961, Dees was hired to defend Claude Henley against an assault charge. Henley had attacked a reporter filming the riots against the “freedom riders,” Black civil rights activists who rode legally desegregated buses. Henley was also the co-defendant in a case with Bobby Shelton, the leader of the United Klans of America. Dees won the case, and after being confronted by Black civil rights advocates, Dees regretted taking the case. Two years later, after the bombing of the Birmingham Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Dees led a fundraising effort at his own Baptist church to support the civil rights movement. 2

In 1963, Dees and Fuller started Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, a prosperous direct marketing business that made most of its money by selling cookbooks to Future Homemakers of America, a predominantly Black technical education nonprofit. 2 In 1964, Dees bought Fuller’s share of the company for $1 million. 4

In 1965, Dees and Fuller volunteered to drive participants to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Soon after, Dees and his wife left their Baptist church and joined a Unitarian church. 2

By the late 1960s, Dees was a multi-millionaire based on his business success and legal practice, and so he began to shift his professional focus towards civil rights. In 1967, Dees was hired by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to defend Garry Dickney, a Vietnam veteran who was suspended from Troy State University after publishing an editorial critical of Alabama Democratic politician and third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the national leader of the pro-segregation movement. In 1968, Dees took on a civil rights case against the city government of Montgomery to prevent historically white Auburn University from using local public funds which had been set aside for historically black Alabama State University. 2

In 1969, Dees successfully sued to integrate Montgomery’s all-white YMCA. 5 The same year, Dees defended the right of civil rights activist William Sloane Coffin to speak at Auburn University. After winning the case, Dees’s home was vandalized by the Ku Klux Klan. 2

In the early 1970s, Dees began to divest himself from his businesses to spend more time on civil rights advocacy. In the mid-1970s, Fuller left his partnership with Dees to focus on nonprofit work. In 1976, he co-founded Habitat for Humanity, a Christian international nonprofit which provides housing and support for low-income individuals. 2

Southern Poverty Law Center

Founding

Dees credited the idea to create a civil rights legal nonprofit in 1968 to having read The Story of My Life, the autobiography of Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended the right to teach evolution in public schools at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. 5

In 1971, Dees founded the Southern Poverty Law Center with legal partner Joe Levin and civil rights activist Julian Bond, the future head of the NAACP. 6  The organization was designed as a private nonprofit legal service for civil rights activism that would charge clients who could afford to pay and provide pro bono services to those who could not. Bond acted as the first honorary president of the SPLC and functioned as its public face. 5 Dees ran the organization and worked as the chief trial counsel. 7

In the early years of the SPLC, the organization primarily focused on issues related to Southern poverty, such as criminal appeals. 7 The SPLC had its first major case in 1974 when it successfully defended Joan Little, a Black woman who killed her kidnapper and accused rapist. The SPLC provided its services on the case for free. 5 The organization shifted its focus throughout the late 1970s and 1980s towards larger civil rights issues, like desegregating the Alabama State Troopers. 7

“Damage Litigation”

Dees pioneered the “damage litigation” strategy wherein rather than prosecute crimes at an individual level, the SPLC would target organizations connected to the accused individual with civil suits to financially strain or even bankrupt the entire organization. 6 Dees has stated that the monetary compensation requested in his civil suits had “no real relation” to the targeted organizations’ assets. This “damage litigation” strategy would be used effectively by Dees and the SPLC to financially ruin numerous prominent white-supremacist groups. 8

In 1983, the SPLC pressed a civil suit against the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of Beaulah Mae Donald, whose son had been murdered. In response, the Klan firebombed the SPLC’s headquarters, resulting in an outpouring of public support. The resulting $7 million liability forced the United Klan of America into bankruptcy, though local Klan chapters persevered independently, and the plaintiffs only received $50,000 in damages. 7 5

In 1990, Dees won a suit against the White Aryan Resistance, and despite only asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, the aggrieved family was awarded $12.5 million, thereby sending the Aryan Resistance into bankruptcy. 8

In 2000, Dees and the SPLC sued the Aryan Nations after persons associated with the organization assaulted a woman and her son. The Aryan Nations were assessed a judgement of $6.3 million, sending leader Richard Girnt Butler into bankruptcy, and forcing the organization to sell off its 20-acre compound in Idaho. 9

Hate Group List

In 1981, the SPLC began to publish a quarterly “Intelligence Report” on the activity of extremist groups in the US. In 1990, the organization started an annual hate group list to record and monitor extremist groups. Critics of Dees claim the lists were a clever marketing tool designed to inflate the threat of extremist groups for the sake of fundraising. 7

In the 2000s and 2010s, the hate lists became a more prominent component of the SPLC’s operations and have attracted controversy and lawsuits for allegedly slandering non-extremist right-leaning organizations and figures with the “hate group” designation, like the Family Research Council 10 and Charles Murray. 11

Fundraising

A major cause of the SPLC’s growth has been prolific fundraising efforts led by Dees based on his former career in direct marketing which prompted Dees to be inducted into the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame in 1998. 7

The SPLC’s early funding came primarily through mailers. Dees had worked as the financial director of then-Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, and after McGovern lost, Dees used the address records of 700,000 Democratic voters to target likely donors to the SPLC. 7

Funding dramatically increased in 1987 after the suit and financial incapacitation of the United Klans of America. The suit brought national attention to SPLC and a mail-in fundraiser immediately after the case brought in $9 million. Since the start of the United Klans of America case in 1983, the SPLC has been criticized for chasing high-profile, low-value litigation for the sake of raising its prestige and attracting more donations. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal staff quit after Dees ignored requests to pursue other issues besides racism, including homelessness and voter registration. 7

In addition to its focus on fundraising, Dees has been criticized for his handling of SPLC funds. In 1994, the SPLC reached $54 million in reserves, yet spent less than $5 million on legal expenses. By 1996, reserves had risen to $68 million with $8 million in legal expenses. 12 Figures from 2017 put annual revenues at almost $122 million, and net assets at over $492 million. 13

Criticisms of Leadership

Dees has been accused by former employees, journalists, and pundits of being focused on prestige and power at the expense of quality activism. Journalist John Edgerton painted Dees as a smooth-talking salesman who latched on to civil rights as a marketing tool to lure funds from gullible guilt-ridden Northerners. Many critics have noted that Dees has kept the SPLC’s focus on right-wing extremism while ignoring left-wing extremism, likely for the sake of fundraising. 3 14

The Montgomery Advertiser, a local newspaper which Dees had sued to enforce desegregation of the paper’s wedding page in the 1970s, has accused Dees of keeping the SPLC focused on racist organizations for the sake of prestige and fundraising even though the membership of racist hate groups has been on the decline since the 1960s and their influence by the 1980s was marginal. 12 14

Former SPLC writer Bob Moser wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2019 which said the organization “has a way of turning idealists into cynics.” He pointed to the SPLC’s lavish office, invasive security, and non-diverse professional staff as surprising contradictions from its public image as a scrappy nonprofit fighting for civil rights. Dees was identified as the driving force behind these trends and set himself up as a “monarch” surrounded by yes-men. Moser also alleged that Dees had a reputation for acting inappropriately towards female staff and new female employees were often warned by co-workers to be wary around their boss. 3

Political Work

While running the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dees served as a key fundraiser on numerous Democratic presidential campaigns. In 1972, Dees was hired as the financial director of the presidential campaign for Senator George McGovern (D-SD). In contrast to the big-donor gifts that characterized prior campaigns, Dees pioneered direct marketing-inspired small-donor outreach and managed to bring in $24 million in small donations from 600,000 individuals. McGovern would lose the election to incumbent President Richard Nixon. 5

Dees would also work as the financial director for the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter in 1976, 15 Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in 1980, and Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO) in 1984. 16

Books and Film

In 1991, the television movie Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story portrayed Dees’s legal battles against numerous extremist groups. 17 The same year, Dees published his autobiography, A Season for Justice. In 1993, Dees and Steve Fiffer published Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo Nazis. In 1997, Dees published Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. In 2004, Dees’s autobiography was republished as A Lawyer’s Journey: The Morris Dees Story with updates on the SPLC’s legal battles in the 90s and early 2000s. 18

Dismissal from the Southern Poverty Law Center

In March 2019, Dees was unexpectedly ousted from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then-SPLC president Richard Cohen, issued a public statement that did not directly state why Dees was fired, but implied that he had violated ethical and behavioral standards. Dees’s lengthy biography was removed from the SPLC’s website (though archival images of his the bio can be found 19 ) and his signature was removed from all fundraising mail pieces. 3

The day after the statement, the Alabama Political Reporter and Los Angeles Times reported that Dees had been ousted after an organization-wide protest by female and minority employees for mistreatment. The disgruntled employees had written two letters to the SPLC’s executive staff alleging multiple instances of sexual harassment which had been covered up, and that Dees had professionally retaliated against accusers. 3

Dees has denied all allegations and says he has “no idea why they let me go.” 3 20

Post-SPLC

After leaving the SPLC, Dees joined the Justice Center of America and took a leading role in its project, The Association for Responsible Gun Owners (TARGO), which aims to destroy the National Rifle Association (NRA). Dees has stated that he is not the founder of the organization, which may be defunct as of 2023. 20

Political Contributions

Dees has sporadically donated to political campaigns over the last three decades, and exclusively to Democratic candidates. Dees has given $4,300 to Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), $2,000 to former Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), $2,000 to Ralph Nader, $1,750 to Josh Segall (D-AL), and $250 to former President Bill Clinton, among other candidates. 21

References

  1. Williams, Lee. “Special Report: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Quietly Pivoted to Gun Control – Second Amendment Foundation.” Second Amendment Foundation -, January 5, 2023. https://www.saf.org/special-report-how-the-southern-poverty-law-center-quietly-pivoted-to-gun-control/.
  2. “Biography: Childhood and Family History.” Learn to Question. Accessed May 31, 2020. http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2001/sites/dees/biography/childhood01.php.
  3.  Moser, Bob. “The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center.” New Yorker. March 21, 2019. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris-dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center.
  4. Klebanow, Diana; Jonas, Franklin L. “People’s Lawyers: Crusades for Justice in American History.” Routledge. Page 474. September 30, 2002. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://books.google.com/books?id=iwd4Ez3g_vgC&pg=PA474&lpg=PA474&dq=He+bought+Fuller+out+in+1964+for+$1+million,+much+of+which+Fuller+donated+to+charity&source=bl&ots=9D4twS3Bzp&sig=ACfU3U2k6BiRyPDs8DgY5agLicWn8ETN6w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtkrjazeHpAhVRZ80KHQ7QDywQ6AEwD3oECBIQAQ#v=onepage&q=He%20bought%20Fuller%20out%20in%201964%20for%20%241%20million%2C%20much%20of%20which%20Fuller%20donated%20to%20charity&f=false.
  5. Spigner, Clarence. “Morris Dees.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Accessed June 1, 2020. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2333.
  6. Chebium, Raju. “Attorney Morris Dees pioneer in using ‘damage litigation’ to fight hate groups.” September 8, 2000. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20060618234711/http://archives.cnn.com/2000/LAW/09/08/morris.dees.profile/.
  7. Pullman, Mark. “A Demagogic Bully.” City Journal. July 27, 2017. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.city-journal.org/html/demagogic-bully-15370.html.
  8. London, Robb. “Sending a $12.5 Million Message to a Hate Group.” New York Times. October 26, 1990. Accessed June 1. 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20121022122753/http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/26/news/sending-a-12.5-million-message-to-a-hate-group.html.
  9. Brown, Jared. “Former Aryan Nations property sold: funds will support North Idaho College human rights education.” The Spokesman Review. March 22, 2020. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/mar/22/former-aryan-nations-property-sold-funds-will-supp/#:~:text=Former%20Aryan%20Nations%20property%20sold%3B%20funds%20will%20support,Idaho%20College%20human%20rights%20education&text=The%20North%20Idaho%20College%20Foundation,less%20than%20a%20year%20ago.
  10. Smith, Jessica Prol. “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.” August 17, 2019. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/17/southern-poverty-law-center-hate-groups-scam-column/2022301001/.
  11. Thiessen, Marc A. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has lost all credibility.” Washington Post. June 22, 2018. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty-law-center-has-lost-all-credibility/2018/06/21/22ab7d60-756d-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html.
  12.  Sack, Kevin. “Conversations/Morris Dees; A Son of Alabama Takes on Americans Who Live to Hate.” New York Times. May 12, 1996. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/12/weekinreview/conversations-morris-dees-a-son-of-alabama-takes-on-americans-who-live-to-hate.html.
  13. “Southern Poverty Law Center Form 990.” ProPublica. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/630598743/05_2019_prefixes_59-64%2F630598743_201810_990_2019051516305281.
  14. Pulliam, Mark. “A Demagogic Bully.” City Journal. July 27, 2017. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.city-journal.org/html/demagogic-bully-15370.html.
  15. “Morris Dees.” MTMP. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://mtmp.com/speaker/morris-dees/.
  16. “Morris Dees Fact Sheet.” John Tanton. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.johntanton.org/answering_my_critics/art_morris_dees_fact_sheet.html.
  17. “Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story.” IMDB. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102311/.
  18. “Books by Morris Dees and Complete Book Reviews.” Publisher’s Weekly. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/morris-dees.html.
  19. [1] “Biography: Childhood and Family History.” Learn to Question. Accessed May 31, 2020. http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2001/sites/dees/biography/childhood01.php.
  20. Lyman, Brian. “Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees working with anti-NRA group.” Montgomery Adviser. December 5, 2019. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/12/05/morris-dees-works-anti-nra-group-splc-co-founder-southern-poverty-law-center/2623415001/.
  21. “Donor Lookup.” Open Secrets. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Morris+Dees.
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