Holding the SPLC Accountable

I hope you’ll forgive me this unorthodoxy, but I’m going to start today with a couple of long quotations from another author, Nathan J. Robinson. The first quote is about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the second is specifically about the SPLC’s much-ballyhooed “Hate Map.” I swear, there’s a point to all of this.

The Southern Poverty Law Center perfectly shows social change done wrong. It was a top-down organization controlled by an incompetent and venal leadership. It was hypocritical in the extreme, preaching anti-racism while fostering a racist internal culture and being led by men whose own commitment to equality was questionable. It didn’t care about listening to and incorporating the viewpoints of the people it was supposed to serve. It was obscenely rich in a time of terrible poverty and squandered much of its considerable wealth. Finally, it picked the wrong political targets and focused on symbolic over substantive change.

The key bit here, of course, is that which tags the SPLC’s leaders—Morris Dees and Richard Cohen—as “men whose own commitment to equality was questionable.” As far back as the late 1980s, the SPLC was identified by various media organizations as a bastion of racial animosity and discrimination. In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser—the SPLC’s hometown paper—published an eight-part series on the center and its leaders, accusing them of various problematic behaviors. The series—which was a Pulitzer finalist in 1995—was based on more than three years of investigation, and it “found a litany of problems and questionable practices at the SPLC, including a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who ‘likened the center to a plantation’; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money not on programs but on raising more money; and paying its top staffers (including Dees and Cohen) lavish salaries.”