Replies

Southern Poverty Law Center who has labeled Family Research Council as a “hate group”...

Founded in 1971 by a pair of Alabama lawyers, Morris Dees and Joe Levin, the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) quickly built a reputation as America’s leading “civil rights law firm,” suing Southern institutions resistant to desegregation, publicizing hate crimes, and using the media to denounce the perpetrators of those crimes. At the time of SPLC’s founding, Julian Bond, who currently chairs the NAACP, was named the fledgling group’s first President.

According to SPLC, white bigotry aimed at racial and ethnic minorities has not diminished at all in recent decades. The Center states, for instance, “Like most of the southeastern U.S., Georgia has seen an explosion in Hispanic immigration in recent years. … As hate groups exploit the racial tension stemming from the area’s growth, locals have launched violent attacks against immigrant workers.” In May 2006, SPLC characterized the critics of pro-open borders rallies (held in several U.S. cities) as “anti-immigration extremists.”

In 1992, SPLC asserted that some 346 white-supremacist organizations were operating in the United States. Even leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn accused SPLC’s Morris Dees of raising funds by “frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street.” Ethical questions about SPLC’s tactics were also raised by Harper’s Magazine, which took issue with the organization’s wont for suing groups for the crimes commited by its indvidual members, “a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause.”

In 1996, USA Today called SPLC, with its $68 million in assets, “the nation’s richest civil rights organization.” By the end of fiscal year 2003, SPLC’s endowment totaled $120.6 million. Morris Dees raised eyebrows in the 1990s when he told an interviewer, “I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church. Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation — why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling.”

In 1995, Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser published a series of investigative reports that raised serious questions about SPLC’s finances. In one instance mentioned by the paper, SPLC won a celebrated $7 million settlement after suing a Ku Klux Klan organization in Alabama. The Klan was without assets and the SPLC client received very little from the suit. By contrast, SPLC directors — having garnered $9 million in donations in a two-year fundraising campaign for the trial — afforded themselves salaries of $350,000 for the trial’s duration.

A 1998 survey conducted by the nonpartisan publication National Journal showed that Morris Dees earned tens of thousands of dollars more each year than the officers of 78 other selected advocacy groups, including the heads of such prominent organizations as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund.

Between 2001 and 2004, SPLC was the recipient of 59 foundation grants totaling $3,326,425.

The donors included:

the Arcus Foundation; the Baltimore Community Foundation; the Cisco Systems Foundation; the Cleveland Foundation, the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation; the Columbus Foundation and Affiliated Organizations; the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan; the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; Community Foundation (Silicon Valley); the Cushman Family Foundation; the Dibner Fund; the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Edward and Verna Gerbic Family Foundation; the Jackson and Irene Golden 1989 Charitable Trust; the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund; the Grove Foundation; the J.M. Kaplan Fund; the J.P Morgan Chase Foundation; the Kaplen Foundation; the Open Society Institute; the Albert Parvin Foundation; the Picower Foundation; the Jay Pritzker Foundation; the Louis and Harold Price Foundation; the Public Welfare Foundation; the Raine and Stanley Silverstein Family Foundation; the Spiegel Foundation; the State Street Foundation; the Steinberg Charitable Trust; and the Vanguard Public Foundation.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6989