Morris Dees

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. His father was named "Morris Seligman" after a Jewish friend of Dees's grandfather. 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's 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, prior to the founding of the SPLC, Dees sued the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Montgomery, Alabama at the request of civil rights activist Mary Louise Smith, whose son Vincent and nephew Edward had been refused admission attend a YMCA summer camp. The YMCA, being a private organization, was presumptively not bound by the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would have forbidden them to discriminate against children on the basis of race. However, Dees discovered that, in order to avoid desegregating its recreational facilities, the city of Montgomery had instead signed a secret agreement with the YMCA to operate them as private facilities but on the city's behalf. This led the trial court to rule that the YMCA had a "municipal charter" and was therefore bound by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to desegregate its facilities. According to historian Timothy Minchin, Dees was "emboldened by this victory" when he founded the SPLC in 1971. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit^(α) later affirmed the trial judge's finding, reversing only his order that the YMCA use affirmative action to racially integrate its board of directors.

Civil lawsuit strategy

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

SPLC lawyers used this legal strategy to hold different factions of the Ku Klux Klan accountable for the actions of their members. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the United Klans of America 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 the Aryan Nations in 2001. Dees's 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.

Criticism

Dees' critics have included the Montgomery Advertiser, which has portrayed his work with the SPLC as self-promotional, contending that Dees exaggerates the threat of hate groups. A 2000 article by Ken Silverstein in Harper's Magazine alleged that Dees kept the SPLC focused on fighting anti-minority groups like the KKK, instead of focusing 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." Stephen Bright, an Atlanta-based civil rights attorney and president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, 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." These comments were made after a controversy pitting Dees against much of the Civil Rights community in his support of the nomination of Edward E. Carnes to be a Federal appeals court judge. Carnes was a well known proponent of the death penalty.

Target of violence

Dees's legal actions against racial nationalist groups have made him a target of many of these organizations. He has received numerous death threats from some of these groups. In 2007 Dees said that over 30 people had been jailed in connection with plots to either kill Dees or blow up the center. 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 by 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.

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. In addition, on March 4, 2016 Dees received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, the highest award given by the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. The award recognizes Dees' achievements in fighting racism and his commitment to nonviolence.

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. He was identified as a Freedom hero by The My Hero Project.

Media appearances

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