From Metapedia
Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is the founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and former direct mail marketeer for book publishing. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and civil rights leader Julian Bond, Dees founded the Center in 1971, the start of a legal career dedicated to suing White political groups, while furthering is own finacial gains.
Morris Seligman Dees, Jr was born in Montgomery, Alabama to Morris Seligman Dees, Sr (13 October 190928 October 1961) and Annie Ruth Frazer, later known as Annie Ruth Nottingham from Mount Meigs, Alabama (1917) on 16 December 1936.
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 autobiography 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 so-called Black 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. Then 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 White groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband and re-organize under different names and different leaders. In a 1987 case against the United Klans of America, he won a $ 7 million judgment for the mother of Michael Donald, a black lynching victim in Alabama. This was topped a decade later, when in 1991 he won a judgment of $12 million against Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance. He was also instrumental in the rewarding of a $6.5 million judgment against Aryan Nations in 2001, which splintered that group as well.
Dees served as President Jimmy Carter’s national finance director in 1976, and as national finance chairman for Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 Democratic primary presidential campaign against Carter.
The story of Dees’ crusade against white activists was fictionalized in a 1991 TV movie entitled Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story.
Dees ran for the board of the Sierra Club as a protest candidate in 2004, qualifying by petition. His sole purpose in running was to use his ballot statement to encourage club members not to vote for three of the candidates, including Richard Lamm, because of their views on immigration. Dees received 7554 votes, coming in 16th out of 17 candidates in the election despite requesting no votes and carrying out no campaign.
In 2006 the University of Alabama School of Law established the “Morris Dees Award” in “honor of University of Alabama alumnus and civil rights attorney Morris Dees.”
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