Morris Dees

Morris Dees
Born	Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. (1936-12-16) December 16, 1936 Shorter, Alabama
Residence	Montgomery, Alabama
Occupation	Civil rights and social justice activist

Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is the principal founder and former chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a former market engineer for book publishing. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., Dees founded the SPLC in 1971, the start of a legal career dedicated to suing organizations in discrimination cases.

Early life

Dees was born in 1936 in Shorter, Alabama, the son of Annie Ruth (Frazer) and Morris Seligman Dees, Sr., tenant cotton farmers. His family was Baptist. It is claimed his father was named "Morris Seligman" after a Jewish friend of Dees' grandfather, however, at least one biography for Dees claims he is Jewish.

After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama and opened a law office.

Marketing career

He ran a book publishing business, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group. 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' former partner Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976 and served in executive roles until 2005.

Civil rights legal practice

In his 1991 autobiography Dees wrote that in 1962 he represented Ku Klux Klan member Claude Henley who faced Federal charges for attacking Freedom Riders in an incident documented by a Life magazine photographer. When Dees learned that another lawyer had asked for $15,000 to represent Henley, Dees offered to do the job for $5,000, roughly the median household salary in America at the time. Dees's defense helped Henley earn an acquittal. But Dees said he later experienced an "epiphany" and regretted his defense of Henley.

In 1969, Dees filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA. 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 new university in an Alabama city that already had a predominantly black state college.

Civil lawsuit strategy

Dees was one of the principal architects of an innovative strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure a court judgment for money damages against an organization for a wrongful act and then use the courts to seize its assets (money, land, buildings, other property) to pay the judgment.

SPLC lawyers used this legal strategy to hold the Klan accountable for the acts of its members. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and won a $7 million judgment for the mother of Michael Donald, a black lynching victim in Alabama. Payment of the judgment bankrupted the United Klans of America and resulted in its national headquarters being sold to help satisfy the judgment. All funds secured in this manner were paid to the family of the deceased.

A decade later, in 1991, Dees obtained a judgment of $12 million against Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance. He was also instrumental in securing a $6.5 million judgment against Aryan Nations in 2001. 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.

Dees' legal actions against racial nationalist groups have made him a target of criticism from many of these organizations. He has received numerous death threats from these groups, and a number of their web sites make strong accusations against him and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Over 30 people have been jailed in connection with plots to kill Dees or blow up the center. Most recently a July 29, 2007, letter allegedly came from Hal Turner, a radio talk show host, paid FBI informant and white supremacist, after the SPLC filed a lawsuit against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, Kentucky. During the IKA trial a former member of the IKA said that the Klan head told him to kill Dees. Morris Dees and William F. McMurry represented the plaintiff in the trial against the IKA in November, 2008.

Political activity

Dees started off in politics working for Southern politician George Wallace in 1958. He served as Senator George McGovern's national finance director in 1972, 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. Dees ran for the board of the Sierra Club as a protest candidate in 2004, qualifying by petition. His campaign was not designed to win election, but to publicize the views of some board members and candidates running for election in a bid to return population control to the organization's agenda. Dees received 7554 votes, coming in 16th out of 17 candidates in the election.

Reception

Praise

In an address on March 1, 2007, at the University of Texas School of Law, Judge Keith Ellison described Morris Dees as “his generation's most valiant and effective soldier in the fight for civil rights and civil liberties.”

Criticism

Dees has faced criticism that he uses too much of the Southern Poverty Law Center's fundraising intake as personal income - and even accusations that the SPLC exists mostly as a fundraising vehicle. A 2000 article by Ken Silverstein in Harper's Magazine, titled "The Church of Morris Dees", alleged that Dees kept the SPLC focused on fighting anti-minority groups like the KKK, instead of on issues like homelessness, mostly because of the greater fundraising potential of the former. The article also claimed that the SPLC "spends twice as much on fund-raising--$5.76 million last year--as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses."

In 2005, Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden called Dees "nothing more than a scam artist." However, Pruden made this comment after the Southern Poverty Law Center accused him of using The Washington Times to push "extremist, neo-Confederate ideas." Stephen Bright, an Atlanta-based civil rights attorney, wrote in 2007 that Dees was "a con man and fraud", who "has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people–some of moderate or low incomes–who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation."

2019 scandal

On 14 March 2019, possibly in association with the "Great Awokening", Dees was fired from the SPLC after a scandal over workplace conduct, reportedly involving now less politically correct activities.

Following the dismissal, a letter signed by two dozen SPLC employees was sent to management, expressing concern that "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it. One former employee wrote that the "unchecked power of lavishly compensated white men at the top" of the SPLC contributed to a culture which made black and female employees the targets of harassment. A week later, President Richard Cohen and legal director Rhonda Brownstein announced their resignations amid the internal upheaval.

Since then, the organization is argued to have become even more radical and explicitly anti-white, distancing itself from previous categorizations of some organizations as black nationalist and black separatist and some mild criticisms of anti-white racism, to the point it has drawn extensive criticism.

Awards and recognition

In 2006, the law firm of Skadden Arps partnered with the University of Alabama School of Law to create the Morris Dees Justice Award in honor of Dees, an Alabama graduate. The award is given annually to a lawyer who has "devoted his or her career to serving the public interest and pursuing justice, and whose work has brought positive change in the community, state or nation". The American Bar Association awarded Dees the ABA Medal, the association's highest honor, during a meeting of the ABA House of Delegates on August 7, 2012.

Over the last several years, Dees has presented numerous lectures on civil rights and justice at universities. In 2009, he was the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony for San Francisco State University.

Media appearances

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

The Dees 1991 autobiography A Season for Justice was updated in 2003 with new material about his case against the Aryan Nations in Idaho and reissued as A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story in a biographical series published by the American Bar Association.

Dees' work was featured on the National Geographic's "Inside American Terror" in 2008.

Bibliography

• Dees, Morris and Steve Fiffer (2003). A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story. Chicago: American Bar Association. ISBN 1-57073-994-3.
• Dees, Morris (1997). Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-092789-5.
• Dees, Morris, and Steve Fiffer. (1993) Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi. New York: Villard Books. ISBN 0-679-40614-X.

References

• Dees, Morris, and Steve Fiffer. 1991. A Season For Justice, (Dees' autobiography) New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-19189-X
• Hall, Dave, Tym Burkey and Katherine M. Ramsland. 2008. Into the Devil’s Den. New York: Ballantine. ISBN 978-0-345-49694-2

External links

Official

• Southern Poverty Law Center – Official website
• Morris Dees: Center founder and chief trial counsel – Official website
• Morris Dees Award – Official website

Other

• Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story (a television movie)
• A 2004 video of Morris delivering the keynote address at the Minnesota Human Rights Day celebration
• Commencement address at DePauw University; May 19, 2001
• The My Hero Project: Morris Seligman Dees