Junk Mail Huckster, Morris Dees, With $220 Million, Awarded $100,000 More

By Steve Bright, cross-posted from Second Class Justice

One of SPLC's Poverty Palaces

Why would a foundation award $100,000 to a junk mail huckster who already has $220 million?

It is a good question for the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation which awarded $100,000 to Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the recipients of the 2011 Gruber Justice Prize.  The announcement said Dees had achieved major civil rights reforms and put hate groups out of business.  But for the past 40 years, Dees primary pursuit has been raising millions upon millions of dollars by sending out tons of junk mail using various aliases and schemes and hiding the enormous wealth that his Center already has.

Dees, a millionaire who had already made money in junk mail before starting the Center in 1971,  has been remarkably successful in his junk mail solicitations for the Southern Poverty Law Center.  It now has $220 million in the bank, as well as two buildings – “poverty palaces” – in Montgomery.

This wealth is all the more remarkable because the operating expenses of the Center have been substantial.  The Center pays high salaries (Dees and President Richard Cohen are paid $300,000 or more, many times what lawyers at other public interest legal programs are paid.  It has built two buildings – one with a very expensive sculpture in front of it.



The Center brags a lot, but hides its success in raising money.  The information about the endowment is in such fine print in the solicitations that one needs a magnifying glass to read it.  Usually the print is in the same color as the paper it is printed on, making it particularly hard to notice or read it.  Of course, very few people would donate to SPLC if they knew how rich it is.

But people have noticed over the years.  The respected southern writer John Egerton wrote an article titled “Poverty Palace” in 1988 that questioned the fund raising tactics of Dees and others at the Center.  At that time – 17 years after its creation – the Center’s endowment was $22 million.The following year, The Other Side, an ecumenical religious magazine, described the Center’s work as “the aggressive distribution of junk mail, soliciting funds for more junk mail.”  It described the Center as “the kind of organization that saps the financial strength of a caring public, turning money that could be used for good into little more than junk mail and a fat endowment for its own well-paid lawyers.”

It told its readers: “You’d have to be absolutely bonkers to give SPLC a penny.”

The Montgomery Advertiser in 1994 did a comprehensive expose of the shady fund raising practices of Dees and the Center, the high salaries of the staff, the lack of almost any black employees, and the mistreatment of the few blacks who worked there.  These articles ran over several days under the general title “Charity of Riches.”  The Advertiser‘s  findings are set out in the initial article in the series.

Two years later, USA Today called the Center “the nation’s richest civil rights organization with $68 million in assets.”   Andrea Stone, “Morris Dees: At the Center of the Radical Storm,” USA Today, August 3, 1996, A-7.

Harper’s magazine reported in 2000 that Dees had promised to stop fund raising once the endowment reached $55 million, but then changed it to $100 million.  Nevertheless, although the endowment had reached $120 million by 2000, Harper’s found the Center “spends most of its time – and money – on a relentless fund-raising campaign.”

Harper’s reported that some of the Center’s junk mail solicitations were “flagrantly misleading.”  One example was a letter sent out in 1995 – when the Center had more than $60 million – that told its readers that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.”

Other solicitations represented that certain activities could not be carried out unless the reader immediately sent a check.   One solicitation, reported by the Montgomery Advertiser, described how a poor woman who needed an overcoat decided to give money to the Center instead of buying an overcoat.  Of course neither that woman nor the people who received the solicitation urging them to follow her example realized they were giving to the richest “civil rights” organization in the country.  Some solicitation just appeal to the ego like paying the Center to have one’s name on its “Wall of Tolerance.”  Names are flashed on a wall by a projector.

Harper’s also pointed out that the year before its article the Center had raised $27 million in donations and received another $17 million from investments for a total of $44 million in income, but spent only $13 million.   In 2007, Harper’s ran  a follow up story  reporting that in 2005 the Center had an income of $44 million, “which dwarfed total spending ($29 million).”  That is how Dees has accumulated $220 million.

The amount of good the Center has accomplished is embarrassingly small in comparison to the enormous wealth that it has.  In the 1970s, the Center handled voting rights, employment and death penalty cases.  But in the early 1980s, Dees shifted its attention to the Ku Klux Klan because fighting the Klan had great fund raising appeal.   This would have been courageous work in the period after Reconstruction or even the 1920s, but it was not in the 1980s.  All of the lawyers who had been working on important cases at the Center resigned.  But Dees made millions by telling people who did not know better that the Klan remained a threat.  Ever since, Dees has taken a few cases based primarily on the potential for using them for fund raising.  And he has found monitoring hate groups and producing materials on teaching tolerance to school children as lucrative areas for junk solicitations.

The Center has won large judgments and received a lot of publicity for suits against the Klan and other hate groups, including $7 million against the United Klans for lynching a black youth.  However, it is seldom mentioned that in some of those cases the Center’s lawyers were suing people and organizations that had no lawyer and could not begin to pay the verdicts against them.  Henry Hayes, who lynched the black youth, was sentenced to death and executed by Alabama.

A remarkable number of people who have worked at the Center do not speak highly of Dees or their experience at the Center.  Dennis Sweet, a prominent African American lawyer in Jackson, MS, who served in the Mississippi legislature, has been particularly outspoken in his criticism of Dees.  He was the second black lawyer to work at the Center.  Both left the Center unhappy.

Sweet, who had been an outstanding public defender in Washington, DC before going to SPLC in the early 1980s, spent two years at the Center.  “Morris treated me differently.  He came after me,” Sweet says in one of the Montgomery Advertiser articles about unequal treatment of black employees at the Center.  “I had just left an environment where I was told I was one of the brightest,” Sweet said, “Morris wanted to say I was a moron.”

Next to raising money, Dees’ other great accomplishment was winning in 1992 the confirmation of Ed Carnes, the very aggressive advocate for executions in the Alabama, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit over the opposition of the entire civil rights community.   The support of Dees was put forward in response to those who pointed out Carnes’ defense of outrageous racial discrimination in capital trials in Alabama and his advocacy of radically rolling back protections for people facing the death penalty.
As a judge, Carnes, as expected, has been for the death penalty and against civil rights .  One recent example is the case of Ash v. Tyson Foods holding that a white supervisor calling black men “boy” – as in “Boy, you better get going” and “hey, boy” – was not evidence of racial bias.  Carnes and his colleagues twice set aside verdicts by juries in Gadsden, Alabama that had found civil rights violations.

Dees and his Center are about raising money through junk mail.  Even with $220 million, Dees still sends out junk mail under various names and schemes – such as Klan Watch, Wall of Tolerance, and Teaching Tolerance.   He sends letters signed by celebrities imploring people to give the Center money to support its “dangerous” work “against the forces of hate, injustice, and intolerance.”

Some appeals even suggest contributions are urgently needed to protect Morris Dees from the Klan or others.  No explanation is offered for why the Center cannot protect Dees with the $220 million it already has.

It is all a fraud.  The money raised will not be used to protect Dees or for “dangerous” work “against the forces of hate, injustice, and intolerance.”  Instead, as has been repeatedly pointed out throughout the Center’s 40-year history, it will be spent on more junk mail to raise money that will be spend on even more junk mail.