Southern Poverty Law Center - History

History

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr. in 1971 as a law firm to handle anti-discrimination cases in the United States. SPLC's first president was Julian Bond who served as president until 1979 and remains on its board of directors. In 1979 the Center brought the first of its many cases against various Ku Klux Klan type organizations. In 1981 the Center began its Klanwatch project to monitor the activities of the KKK. That project, now called Hatewatch, has been expanded to include seven other types of hate organizations.

In July 1983, the center's office was firebombed, destroying the building and records. In February 1985 Klan members and a Klan sympathizer pleaded guilty to federal and state charges related to the fire. At the trial Klansmen Joe M. Garner and Roy T. Downs Jr. along with Charles Bailey pleaded guilty to conspiring to intimidate, oppress and threaten members of black organizations represented by SPLC." According to Dees over 30 people have been jailed in connection with plots to kill him or blow up the center.

In 1984 Dees became an assassination target of The Order, a revolutionary white supremacist group, for his work with the SPLC. Another target, radio host Alan Berg, was killed by the group outside his Colorado home.

In 1987, SPLC won a case against the United Klans of America for the lynching of Michael Donald, a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama. The SPLC used an unprecedented legal strategy of holding an organization responsible for the crimes of individual members to help produce a $7 million judgment for the victim's mother. The verdict bankrupted the United Klans of America and resulted in its national headquarters being sold for about $52,000 to help satisfy the judgment. In 1987 five members of a Klan offshoot, the White Patriot Party, were indicted for stealing military weaponry and plotting to kill Dees.

In 1989 the Center unveiled its Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin. The Center's "Teaching Tolerance" project was initiated in 1991, and its "Klanwatch" program has gradually expanded to include other anti-hate monitoring projects and a list of reported hate groups in the United States.

In October 1990, the SPLC won $12.5 million in damages against Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance when a Portland, Oregon, jury held the neo-Nazi group liable in the beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant. While Metzger lost his home and ability to publish material, the full amount of the multi-million dollar reward was not recovered. In 1995, a group of four white males were indicted for planning to blow up the SPLC. In May 1998, three white supremacists were arrested for allegedly planning a nationwide campaign of assassinations and bombings targeting "Morris Dees, an undisclosed federal judge in Illinois, a black radio-show host in Missouri, Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and the Anti-Defamation League in New York."

In July 2007, the SPLC filed suit against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, where in July 2006 five Klansmen allegedly beat Jordan Gruver, a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent, at a Kentucky county fair. After filing the suit the SPLC received nearly a dozen threats. During the November 2008 trial on the lawsuit, a former member of the IKA said that the Klan head told him to kill Dees.

In 2008, the SPLC and Dees were featured on National Geographic's Inside American Terror exploring their litigation against several branches of the Ku Klux Klan.