This week’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on federal fraud charges for allegedly abusing donor dollars to foment “hate” on the Right has left observers wondering how the SPLC, once a legitimate civil rights advocacy organization, morphed into a left-wing attack machine.
In its early days, the SPLC worked to ensure women had equal employment opportunities, secured better labor conditions for cotton mill workers, and successfully challenged segregationist policies, at times taking the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
But following the defeat of lingering Jim Crow-era legal barriers, which it had helped dismantle, the SPLC started straying from its original mission of uplifting the marginalized in search of opponents to fill a growing demand shortage.
Until then, the SPLC mainly made money off of its donor base’s disdain toward the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually, the KKK declined in membership, leading the SPLC to look elsewhere for political enemies, even if it meant targeting mainstream conservatives.
Honorable origins
The SPLC, as its name indicates, began as a legal clinic in the deep South focused on fighting poverty, racial discrimination, and other issues affecting marginalized populations that came to the forefront of American society as a result of the 1960s civil rights movement.
Co-founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin, Jr., both Alabama attorneys, the SPLC was born out of a 1970 class action lawsuit, Smith v. Young Men’s Christian Association of Montgomery, that Dees had filed on behalf of two black children who were denied entry to a YMCA summer camp in Montgomery.
Dees won the landmark civil rights case when a federal court ruled that the city’s YMCA location was wrongly excluding black patrons from accessing its facilities and ordered the site to end its discriminatory practices.
In 1971, Dees and Levin formally incorporated the SPLC, organizing it as a 501(c)(3) charity based out of Montgomery, the birthplace of the U.S. civil rights movement. Soon after, civil rights leader Julian Bond, later chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was named the SPLC’s first president.
Over the ensuing decades, with its litigation prowess and ample funds from supporters committed to advancing equality, the SPLC went on to bankrupt numerous notorious white supremacist organizations, including the United Klans of America and the Aryan Nations.
Fall from grace
In 2019, Dees was abruptly fired from the SPLC for misconduct. Reports emerged citing years of sexual harassment, gender bias, and racist attitudes at SPLC, the sorts of injustice that the civil rights institution claimed to oppose.
Allegations of impropriety within SPLC’s ranks date back further.
In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser published an investigative series on the SPLC, discovering that the organization dedicated to fighting bigotry overexaggerated the KKK’s threat as a strategic fundraising tactic, paid its top brass — for instance, Dees, its multimillionaire chief litigator — lavish salaries, and poorly treated its few minority employees.
Some black SPLC staffers complained about hearing the use of racial slurs in the workplace to the extent that they likened the law center to “a plantation.”
Several charity watchdogs, per the expose’s findings, accused the SPLC of misleading donors and raking in massive amounts of cash while spending relatively little on actual program services. According to the newspaper, the SPLC raised roughly $62 million in donations and spent about $21 million on its programs from 1984 to 1994.
The report was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, chosen for the local outlet’s “probe of questionable management practices and self-interest at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s best-endowed civil rights charity.”
Around that time, other articles critical of the SPLC’s crowdfunding operations circulated even among liberal circles, including an earlier 1988 piece, titled “Poverty Palace: How the Southern Poverty Law Center got rich fighting the Klan,” that appeared in The Progressive, a left-leaning magazine.
Stoking the flames of fear to fill its war chest
Thanks to the fundraising chops of Dees, a mail marketing pioneer who previously ran the financing arms of four Democratic presidential candidates, the SPLC was able to amass extraordinary wealth through direct mail solicitation.
These mailers often appeared as alarmist letters and “urgent” pleas for cash to aid the SPLC’s war against the supposed rise of far-right ideologues, although they were operating on the margins by the 1980s.
The Nation, a left-of-center publication, described Dees’s strategy as “scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.”
The SPLC faced further criticism, publicly and from members of the left-wing donor class, for raising more money than it expended on litigating cases, its initial purpose. For instance, in 1994, the SPLC reached $54 million in reserves, yet spent less than $5 million on legal expenses.
Leftward mission creep
More than 30 years after its founding, it seemed that the SPLC saw so much success working to stamp out white supremacy that, when the KKK’s influence waned and similar groups were sued out of existence, the anti-extremism organization needed to expand what it classified as an extremist.
In the 2000s, the SPLC positioned itself against a wide range of conservative causes, including gun ownership rights, anti-abortion advocacy, and immigration control.
Accordingly, the SPLC pivoted to broadly label proponents of these issues as far-right radicals, lumping them in together with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis.
In 1981, the SPLC created a “Klanwatch” tracking system to monitor Ku Klux Klan activity across the country. That tracker was later rebranded to “Hatewatch,” the project’s name today, which now identifies so-called “hate groups” nationwide, particularly on the “American radical right.”
In 2010, the SPLC drew intense backlash from both sides of the political aisle for identifying the Family Research Council, an evangelical Christian organization, as an “anti-gay” extremist group. Still, the SPLC continues to hit right-aligned figures and organizations with the “hate group” designation.
Much of the SPLC’s energy and organizing power appears to go toward this type of political messaging, instead of litigation.
Today, the SPLC engages in far less litigation than it did last century. Its courtroom victories are scarcer.
Between 1980 and 2000, the SPLC touted 17 such triumphs, while from 2000 onward, it boasted only a handful of meaningful wins. Many of its cases today are politically charged, centered on congressional redistricting and opposing election security efforts, rather than traditional civil rights complaints.