March 16, 2019

USA: Far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Co-Founder Fired After Two Dozen Employees Accused Him Of Mistreatment, Sexual Harassment, Gender Discrimination, And Even Racism.

The Los Angeles Times
written by Matt Pearce
Thursday March 14, 2019

The Southern Poverty Law Center has fired its famed co-founder, Morris Dees, over unspecified misconduct, the nonprofit announced Thursday, a stunning development at an organization that became a bedrock of anti-extremism research and activism under nearly half a century of Dees’ leadership.

While the organization’s leadership did not disclose the reason for Dees’ departure, staff at its headquarters in Montgomery, Ala., were told in an internal email that “although he made unparalleled contributions to our work, no one’s contributions can excuse that person’s inappropriate conduct.”

The Times has also learned that the organization, whose leadership is predominantly white, has been wrestling with complaints of workplace mistreatment of women and people of color. It was not immediately clear whether those issues were connected to the firing of Dees, who is 82.

Also Thursday, employees sent correspondence to management demanding reforms, expressing concerns about the resignation last week of a highly respected black attorney at the organization and criticizing the organization’s work culture.

A letter signed by about two dozen employees — and sent to management and the board of directors before news broke of Dees’ firing — said they were concerned that internal “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it.”

In a public statement, Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC, announced that an outside organization would be hired immediately “to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve — one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected.”

Dees co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 and gained fame by suing members of the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the anti-hate organization’s offices being firebombed in 1983.

The son of a white tenant farmer in Alabama, he cut a swashbuckling figure as a Klan-busting attorney in the Deep South, drawing scorn in some mainstream corners for his showmanship and his prodigious fundraising abilities, which he had honed in his previous life as a millionaire direct-mail marketer.

His 1991 autobiography “reads like a treatment for a Hollywood epic,” The Times wrote in a review at the time.

In less mainstream corners, Dees’ name is loathed by white nationalists and other far-right groups that have been targeted in lawsuits or published research by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s staff of lawyers, analysts and undercover operatives. In recent years, some conservatives have accused the center of casting too wide a net in defining what is a “hate” group.

In his statement about Dees, Cohen wrote: “As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”

Asked about the nature of Dees’ alleged misconduct, a spokesman for the organization said in an email: “We can’t comment on the details of individual personnel decisions.”

In an interview Thursday, Dees told the Montgomery Advertiser: "It was not my decision, what they did. I wish the center the absolute best. Whatever reasons they had of theirs, I don't know."

Lower-level staff members were caught off guard by Dees’ firing, which was announced internally in an email and a conference call Thursday morning.

Dees was not a regular presence for low-level staff at the organization’s sleek, modern downtown Montgomery headquarters, whose lobby contains remains from the firebombing as a memento and which is guarded by security staff.

In recent years, according to the center’s internal email to staff, Dees’ role has been focused on “donor relations" — expanding the Southern Poverty Law Center’s financial resources, which nearly totaled half a billion dollars in assets in 2017, according to the group’s most recently available public financial disclosures.

The center’s war chest vastly overshadows the minuscule financial resources that some far-right groups are capable of assembling, making it a frequent target for criticism, though the organization has also expanded its efforts to support more traditional civil liberties litigation, including fighting for better prison conditions.

Dees has not been involved in the liberal-leaning organization’s “programmatic initiatives,” such as the Hatewatch blog. Cohen is the top leader most often featured and interviewed in the press as the organization has geared up to face a far-right movement that has grown energized in recent years. (Cohen did not respond to requests for further comment.)

Over his more than 40 years at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dees formed coalitions with major civil rights groups, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and his departure took some civil rights leaders by surprise.

"Wow, that is a shocker to me," said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama NAACP chapter. "We don't have a comment until we see what this is about."

Simelton’s organization has frequently teamed with the Southern Poverty Law Center on civil rights lawsuits.

The center has faced complaints in the past that it does not employ enough black staffers.

In an internal email to the organization’s legal department announcing her departure last Friday, a black attorney suggested the center needed to create a more inclusive work environment.

“As a woman of color, the experiences of staff of color and female staff have been particularly important to me ... and we recognize that there is more work to do in the legal department and across the organization to ensure that SPLC is a place where everyone is heard and respected and where the values we are committed to pursuing externally are also being practiced internally,” she wrote.

The Times is not identifying the attorney because she could not immediately be reached to confirm the authorship of the message.

The center’s leaders forwarded the attorney’s email to the rest of the center’s staff, saying that they were “grateful” for her work and that she “raised important issues of gender and race — issues that the leadership of SPLC is committed to addressing in an honest and forthright manner,” including additional training for management for “racial equity, inclusion and results.”

“We’ll be soliciting additional ideas from across the organization on how we can be more diverse, equitable and inclusive,” the managers' email said. It was signed by Cohen and the organization’s legal director and director of human resources.

Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, has long questioned what he calls the center’s “fraudulent” fundraising.

“The chickens have had a very long trip, but they finally came home to roost," Bright said.

“Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars.”

While the SPLC funded some good work, Bright said, he had long heard complaints about race discrimination and sexual harassment from the center’s former attorneys and interns.

“It’s remarkable," he said, "how many people who have worked at the center have not spoken very well of the center after they left."
Montgomery Advertiser
written by Melissa Brown and Brian Edwards
Thursday March 15, 2019

The Southern Poverty Law Center fired Morris Dees, the nonprofit civil rights organization's co-founder and former chief litigator.

SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement Dees' dismissal over his misconduct was effective on Wednesday, March 13. When pressed for details on what led to the termination, the organization declined to elaborate.

"As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world," Cohen said in the emailed statement. "When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action."

Dees, 82, co-founded the Montgomery-based organization in 1971.

"It was not my decision, what they did," Dees said when reached by phone. "I wish the center the absolute best. Whatever reasons they had of theirs, I don't know."

On Thursday, he said he hadn't tried a case in at least a decade and hadn't recently been involved in the day-to-day operations of the SPLC.

Morris Dees: 5 things to know about the SPLC co-founder

Dees' termination is one of several steps taken by the organization this week, Cohen said.

"Today we announced a number of immediate, concrete next steps we’re taking, including bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve — one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected," Cohen said.

What the SPLC wants the "next steps" to address or correct remains unclear. An SPLC spokesperson said the organization was "in the process of hiring" the firm for the workplace climate assessment, and no other leadership changes had been announced.

A message seeking further comment was left on Cohen’s cell phone Thursday afternoon.

"I’ve read the statement they issued," Dees said when asked if he knew why he was fired. "I feel like some of the things in the statement were unfortunate. But I refuse to say anything negative about the center or its employees. I’ll let my life’s work and reputation speak for itself."

When asked if he was offered the chance to resign or retire, the 82-year-old said, "I've told you all I can tell you."

Dees' biography appeared scrubbed from the SPLC's website as news broke of his termination on Thursday afternoon.

Morris Dees, SPLC funding and civil rights cases

A Montgomery native, Dees attended Sidney Lanier High School. He burnished his marketing chops by managing a direct sale book publishing company while attending the University of Alabama, where he also earned a law degree.

After returning home to establish a law practice in 1960, Dees won a series of civil rights cases before establishing the SPLC with lawyer Joseph J. Levin Jr. and civil rights activist Julian Bond a decade later.

The legal partnership netted significant civil rights triumphs. Dees challenged systemic discrimination and segregation in Alabama state trooper ranks in a case won in the U.S. Supreme Court. SPLC litigation challenging Alabama's legislative districts forced the state to redraw its districts in the early 1970s, leading to the election of more than a dozen black legislators in 1974.

Early SPLC lawsuits also fought for better conditions for cotton mill workers in Kentucky, women in the workplace and poor defendants on death row. The organization bankrupted a Ku Klux Klan Organization, the United Klans of America, in a 1987 civil case.

Dees has been a fixture in politics since the group's ascension, though his organization has faced scrutiny in the past.

A 1994 Montgomery Advertiser series provided a deep look into the organization controlled by the multimillionaire Dees, illustrating his near-singular control over the organization and its mammoth budget.

The series, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, revealed a figure seen as heroic by some and single-minded by others. Dees' critics said he was more concerned with fundraising than litigating.

The series also alleged discriminatory treatment of black employees within the advocacy group, despite its outward efforts to improve the treatment of minorities in the country. Staffers at the time “accused Morris Dees, the center’s driving force, of being a racist and black employees have ‘felt threatened and banded together.’” The organization denied the accusations raised in the series.

"I would hope the IRS and the Justice Department would take this as [an] opportunity to come in and take a close look at The Center, it's finances and it's day-to-day operations," said Jim Tharpe, managing editor of the Advertiser in the mid-1990s, who oversaw the Advertiser series. "It's long overdue."

Dees' central role in the organization has also led to numerous threats against him, and the Advertiser previously reported that he has 24-hour protection at his home.

SPLC a war chest of funds that dwarfs over NAACP and Equal Justice Initiative

Over the years, the SPLC has continued to amass massive funds from donors amid differing levels of scrutiny. The nonprofit has hundreds of employees and offices in four states. The organization had nearly $450 million in net assets, according to publicly available tax documents filed for 2017.

That figure easily dwarfs other civil rights groups — such as the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP — during the same time frame. The Montgomery-based EJI had about $57 million in net assets at that time and the NAACP had about $3.8 million.

SPLC still fell behind other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, which pulled in more than $526 million between its main nonprofit and foundation in 2017 filings, with several local groups collecting additional millions of dollars not included in that figure.

In recent years, the organization has become nationally known and scrutinized for its Hatewatch work tracking the rise of hate groups, particularly white supremacists.

It produces research and advocacy work on a variety of topics, including payday lending, civil asset forfeiture and immigration rights. The SPLC also continues day-to-day civil rights litigation, including an ongoing lawsuit to address prison conditions in Alabama.

“The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses — truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment," Cohen said.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 6:14 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)