The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR): Who is the Southern Poverty Law Center and What is Their Role in the Campaign Against Prop. 200?

As predictably as the rooster crowing at dawn, whenever and wherever American citizens protest mass immigration—legal or illegal—the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) springs into action, attempting to malign them as "hate groups." So, when concerned citizens in Arizona, with the support and encouragement of local and national elected officials, and national immigration reform organizations, mobilized to place an initiative on the November 2004 ballot, SPLC immediately instituted a campaign to discredit them. To date, no organization advancing the case for reduced immigration is viewed by the SPLC as a "legitimate" organization—not one!

Some 190,000 people in Arizona signed petitions placing Proposition 200 on the upcoming ballot. Prop. 200, which initial polls show has the support of 74 percent of the electorate, would require the state to screen to ensure that illegal aliens do not receive benefits or access to government-funded programs that are specifically prohibited to them under federal law. The ballot measure also requires that people demonstrate proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and present identification at the polls to ensure that the person casting a vote is actually the person who registered.

Unlike other advocacy groups promoting large-scale immigration to the United States, SPLC makes no attempt to justify their positions on economic, or humanitarian grounds. Rather SPLC's sole function in the immigration policy debate is to attempt to discredit any individual or organization that supports reductions in immigration and enforcement of immigration laws.

The charges invariably leveled by SPLC have long since been discredited as utterly specious, or at best a McCarthyist version of Six Degrees of Separation, in which everyone advocating immigration reform can charged with having talked someone, who talked to someone, who talked to someone else who is a bad person. Similarly, SPLC tries to connect carefully selected dots in an attempt to prove that funding for all immigration reform advocates is tainted.

The most often cited, and most often repudiated allegation of SPLC is that all immigration reform advocates and organizations are, in fact, advocates of a long discredited pseudo-science known as eugenics. This charge, on which SPLC's entire smear campaign is based, stems from the fact that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) received money from the Pioneer Fund in the 1980s. Some of the founders of the Pioneer Fund, in the 1930s, had supported research in the field of eugenics.

Based on that line of reasoning—that the views of a foundation's founder some three-quarters of a century ago have any bearing on the foundation's grantees today—all recipients of Ford Foundation largesse would have to be considered suspect of harboring racist and anti-Semitic views. Such assertions are, of course, patently ridiculous. (Provided below is a partial list of Pioneer Fund grants over the past few years.)

Who is the SPLC?

SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, an Alabama attorney, in 1971. Since that time SPLC has raised hundreds of millions of dollars "outing" organizations they deem to be right-wing hate groups. While their often wild accusations are still reported by an unquestioning mainstream media, SPLC was itself "outed" in the November 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine, a venerable and independent mainstream publication (see below). According to contributing editor Ken Silverstein in an article entitled, "The Church of Morris Dees," the SPLC is little more than a direct mail outfit that has raised heaps of money hyping hate crimes—real and imagined—while doing virtually nothing for the victims.

At the time his article appeared, Silverstein claimed that the SPLC had $120 million in the bank. This included the surplus from $27 million it had raised the previous year through its direct mail operation, though it had spent only $13 million on its civil rights' activities. The group spends twice as much on fund-raising activities each year as it does on legal services for the people whose causes they purport to champion. SPLC's fund-raising-to-expenditure ratio has earned them one of the American Institute of Philanthropy's worst ratings for any of the organizations it monitors. Here are the numbers from SPLC's October 31, 2001 report to the IRS on Form 990: Income $36 million; Expenses $23 million; Profit $13 million; losses from playing the stock market with donors' money: $27 million; net assets down to only $114 million. (Click here for the link to the SPLC Guidestar Form 990 report in PDF format. Be sure to look up the salary information on page 4 and Schedule A of this report.)

Another revelation in the Harper's article—one that is far less shocking in the post-Enron and WorldCom era than it was a few years ago—is that accounting procedures have allowed the SPLC to disguise fund-raising activities as "educational" activities. According to the tax records Silverstein reviewed, of the $10.8 million SPLC claimed to spend on educational activities in 1999, $6.4 million was actually spent soliciting contributions.

Rather than being legitimate crusaders against alleged right-wing "hate" groups, SPLC and Dees have been shameless exploiters of the misfortunes of people they do almost nothing to help, claims Silverstein. Alarmist, and often graphic, direct mail solicitations hyping supposed hate crimes that are usually the sick handiwork of lone individuals rather than organized groups, net the SPLC handsome returns while doing little or nothing to aid the victims. The hate "groups" the SPLC relentlessly raises money to fight are often the figment of SPLC's direct mail department's overheated imagination, and unrelated crimes are attributed to these groups because, like sex and fear, hate sells.

His former partner in the direct marketing business that Dees ran before starting SPLC confesses that the two of them were not above hucksterism in their quest to amass profits. "We were not particular about how we did it," Dees' former business partner is quoted saying in Harper's. More interestingly, Dees, who has made a career (and a ton of money—his recently listed yearly salary was $259,000, plus $21,000 in "benefits") exposing right-wing hate groups, received payment from the Ku Klux Klan when he was a practicing attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1960s.

The very serious questions about SPLC raised by Silverstein and others do not prove or disprove the allegations they make against FAIR or other immigration reform advocates. We invite scrutiny of our record and advocacy over the past quarter century of the group's existence. The reporting of Silverstein and the assessment of SPLC by the American Institute of Philanthropy, however, should lead responsible news media to carefully scrutinize the assertions and accusations made by SPLC. It does suggest that the record, motives, and tactics of the organization leveling the charges should not be taken at face value.

Pioneer Fund Recipient (Partial List)

November 1, 2000
SECTION: No. 1806, Vol. 301; Pg. 54 ; ISSN: 0017-789X
LENGTH: 2020 words
HEADLINE: THE CHURCH OF MORRIS DEES.
BYLINE: Silverstein, Ken
BODY:

How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance

Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then. Today, the SPLC spends most of its time—and money—on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." The center earned $ 44 million last year alone—$ 27 million from fund-raising and $ 17 million from stocks and other investments—but spent only $ 13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants. But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains—like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler—eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras. In 1987, Dees won a $ 7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $ 51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser the SPLC, meanwhile, made $ 9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse. Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history—and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's—was never credibly linked to any militia organization.

No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhilike disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy—or the confession thereof—is an end in itself.

Any good salesman knows that a product's "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees—who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern—is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation—why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $ 30 on the SPLC website into "a $ 325 value."

This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements—such as angry black people—and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.

Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995—when the center had more than $ 60 million in reserves—informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the center had less than $ 10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $ 55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $ 100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fundraising." Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $ 120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising—$ 5.76 million last year—as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."

The SPLC's "other important work for justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members—a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues—such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action--that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."

Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $ 10.8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $ 4 million went to solicitations. Another $ 2.4 million paid for stamps.

In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I ... shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $ 273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly." Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.

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Who is the SPLC?

Pioneer Fund Recipient (Partial List)