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May 7, 2001

NEA Selects Morris Dees as Friend of Education. The National Education Association has selected Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as its 2001 Friend of Education, an award previously given to such luminaries as Senators Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. It will be interesting to see what the selection of Dees, often credited with putting the Ku Klux Klan out of business in Alabama, has upon the avowed leftists among NEA’s delegates, who are far from one mind about Dees’s achievements.

For at least six years, noted left-wing journalists such as Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair and Ken Silverstein have criticized Dees as someone who fills his own pockets while "frightening elderly liberals into ponying up contributions with the fantasy that the heirs to Adolf Hitler are about to come marching down Main Street, lynching blacks and putting the Jews into gas ovens."

Harper’s published a piece in November 2000 entitled "The Church of Morris Dees" in which Silverstein quotes a former Dees associate calling Dees "the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement, though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." Silverstein writes that the SPLC has an endowment of over $120 million, but spends twice as much on fund-raising as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. Dees himself made $273,000 in 1999 and was named to the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame.

In The New York Press last January, Cockburn called Dees and the SPLC "collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life," and quoted a former Dees partner as saying that the SPLC was "little more than a 900 number." Cockburn also cited an SPLC "special report" which claimed the groups that put together the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations, including environmental groups and labor unions, had been infiltrated by "the hard-edged soldiers of neofascism."