Morris Dees

Morris Dees is the founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He founded the Center in 1969, the start of a legal career dedicated to suing hate groups and taking controversial cases that were highly unpopular in the white community.

After graduation from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama and opened a law office. He ran a book publishing business, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, which grew to become a successful company in its own right. After what Dees described in his autobigraohy as "a night of soul searching at a snowed-in Cincinnati airport" in 1967, he sold the company in 1969 to Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. He used the revenue generated by the sale to found the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971.

Dees' new legal firm began taking part in civil rights cases that frequently put him in the spotlight. He filed suit to stop construction of a white university in an Alabama city that already had a predominantly black state college. In 1969, he filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA.

Dees' most famous cases have involved landmark damage awards that have driven several prominent neo-Nazi groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband and re-organize under different names and different leaders. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and won a seven million dollar settlement. This was topped a decade later, when in 1991 he won a judgement of $12 million against White Aryan Resistance. He was also instrumental in the rewarding of a $6.5 million judgement against Aryan Nations in 2001, which splintered that group as well.

While the actions of the SPLC against hate groups have won considerable praise and accolades for Dees, he has also been subjected to criticism for the legal tactics used in obtaining these judgements, which enforce the idea that neo-Nazi groups are subject to "guilt by association," rather than from direct involvement in violent hate crimes.

Dees' legal actions against racist groups have made him Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of many white supremacists. He has received numerous death threats, and a number of neo-Nazi Web sites make strong accusations against him and the Southern Poverty Law Ceter (some of which border on slander or libel). There is even a Web site dedicated to gathering "dirt" on Dees, entitled "Deeswatch."

In 1972, Dees was the finance director for Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. He also served as President Jimmy Carter's national finance director in 1976, and as national finance chairman for Senator Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign.

Published books

• A Season For Justice, Dees' autobiography, published in 1991. Reprinted in 2001 as A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story.

• Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, 1993. It chronicles the trial and $12.5 million judgment against white supremacist Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance group for their responsibility in the beating death of a young black student in Portland, Oregon.

• Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, 1996.