The State Of Hate Morris Dees Has Devoted His Life To Fighting Hate Groups, And In Turn Finds Himself Hated By Them

Plenty of people hate Morris Dees.

The Order, an infamous hate group, once had him at the top of its hit list. A dozen people have done jail time for making threats against Dees and the organization he heads, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Someone burned down his offices in 1983.

And a stroll through the World Wide Web reveals numerous screeds against Dees.

One entry begins like this: “I have received some way hardcore info concerning our Mr. Dees - court records, ugly stuff, illicit behavior,” and it then proceeds to speculate on the most intimate details of his private life.

The moral: When you devote your life to fighting hate, prepare to be hated.

Dees, who will give the keynote address at the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment’s 10th annual conference Saturday at Gonzaga University, has been keeping a watchful eye on the white supremacist movement for more than 15 years.

So naturally his enemies are particularly violent and hate-filled enemies.

“Oh, these guys don’t like us a bit,” said Dees by phone from his Montgomery, Ala., office. “They put out all kinds of (nonsense) on us.”

Dees said that he has even been warned against coming to Spokane for this speech.

“I don’t like to talk about the threats we get,” he said. “But I don’t mind saying this: We have as sophisticated a security operation as any private organization could have.”

Dees’ said his group has earned the anger of hate groups through legal action, not just talk.

“I mean, we’re out there taking people’s double-wide trailers and five acres when we get a judgment,” said Dees. “And that does piss them off. There are close to 25 or 30 of them in prison today, or have been in prison, for stuff we got them put in for.”

Dees didn’t start out to become a Klan nemesis - he grew into it. He was raised in a little town outside of Montgomery - Mount Meigs - where he still lives. He and a partner founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 in order to handle traditional civil rights cases. The focus began to change in 1980, when they handled a case involving the Klan. After investigating the Klan for four or five years, the Southern Poverty Law Center uncovered so much evidence that 10 Klansmen were indicted.

“That sort of launched it, right there,” said Dees. “… We began to gather data on these people, and things began to happen.”

Those investigations inevitably led Dees to look at the Northwest, which has been a particularly fertile territory for hate groups, a fact which baffles Dees.

“Up in your area, which is almost all white folks, not even many Jewish people, you wonder why they would be so adamant up in that area, when in fact they don’t have any minority to worry about hardly anyway,” said Dees.

Maybe it can be explained by looking at the movement’s ultimate goal.

“The goal is the ultimate return of this country to the control of the Aryan whites,” said Dees. “A lot of these groups would say their (focus) is not racial, but then they talk about the Jewish banking conspiracy, and they don’t want immigrants, and they don’t want this or that or the other. Basically, they want America like it looks around Spokane and Idaho.”

Dees said this movement, united by this common goal, has an “ever-changing method of operation and cast of characters.” For instance, he believes the so-called “militia” movement lost some steam after the Oklahoma City bombing.

“The average militia types are not bad folks, they’re just frustrated because government isn’t working,” said Dees. “… They just decide to go to a meeting and get their little two cents’ worth off. But when the Oklahoma bombing occurred and everybody started talking militia, people said, ‘Whoa, I don’t know about that. I don’t want to get involved in that.”’ So he said he isn’t too concerned about the so-called militia leaders like the Militia of Montana’s John Trochmann, who “was the general of an army of about five.”

“It seems like everybody in the media has the same Rolodex, so when they want something on the militia, they wheel in old bearded Trochmann, and they get the same old stuff,” said Dees. “When the public hears that, they say, ‘These guys are bozos, they’re kooks,’ and the public discounts them as kooks. But so does Louis Beam, he discounts them as kooks, too. He thinks John Trochmann is an idiot.”

Louis Beam is a former Klansman and a so-called Aryan Nations ambassador. Dees worries far more about the Louis Beams of the world than the John Trochmanns. Beam preaches “leaderless resistance,” small groups which are not connected by any chain of command but have the same essential goal. A “little bunch” like this can create a lot of havoc, he said.

Still, he said, he sees no way that these individuals, in the foreseeable future, “have any chance of overthrowing the U.S. government.”

He said the FBI has finally started using its most powerful tool.

“All they have to do is infiltrate any group that proposes to use violence,” said Dees. “That’s all they have to do. That doesn’t violate anybody’s rights.”

But for this to be effective, he said the public needs to understand law enforcement’s difficult position.

“When they arrested the Arizona Vipers, they had videotapes and explosives they took out and detonated,” said Dees. “But it wasn’t before long that even the news media was saying the government overreacted - that these guys weren’t that dangerous, they were just a bunch of weekend soldiers, and all this talk about blowing up buildings was just so much hype.

“Well, I guarantee you, if they had arrested Timothy McVeigh and whoever else was with him because some informant heard they were going to blow up a building … I guarantee somebody would have said, ‘Well, the government is overreacting, they weren’t going to do any such thing.”’ So Dees has two suggestions for the public. First, take these groups seriously and understand law enforcement’s need to stop them before the bomb goes off.

And for a more long-term solution, teach tolerance to children.

He said the Southern Poverty Law Center has a Teaching Tolerance Education Program that supplies 55,000 schools with materials and sends out a magazine to 500,000 teachers.

Meanwhile, people must understand exactly what free speech is and what it isn’t.

“You don’t want to infringe on First Amendment rights,” said Dees. “The truth of it is, you can have all the free speech you want to without having explosives and an AK-47 out there shooting.”

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MEMO: Morris Dees’ keynote speech will be at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Northwest Coalition against Malicious Harassment’s conference at Gonzaga. The conference runs today through Sunday. Call 328-4220 ext. 2105 for registration. Dees also speaks at 7:30 tonight at the Davenport Hotel in a lecture sponsored by Gonzaga School of Law. To register, call 328-4220 ext. 3759.