Dees: ‘Deep Passion For Justice’ Key Southern Poverty Law Center Co-Founder Speaks At UI

Morris Dees, the first lawyer to sue the Ku Klux Klan and a leading voice against America’s militia movement, testified in defense of his profession Saturday to 76 of its newest members.

In remarks at the University of Idaho College of Law commencement, Dees said lawyers like Gerry Spence, who defended white separatist Randy Weaver, and Stephen Jones, lawyer for Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, should be honored for their “deep passion for justice.”

It’s that passion, he said, that will make the difference as the current crop of UI lawyers begins arguing in courtrooms, Dees said.

“The side that usually prevails is the side that has a deep passion for justice,” he said.

Dees, chief counsel and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the most high-profile lawyer to challenge American hate groups. In 1987, he won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America for its role in the lynching of a black college student in Mobile, Alabama. Three years later, he won a $12.5 million judgment against Thomas Metzger, his son and the White Aryan Resistance, which had prompted three Portland men to kill an Ethiopian student.

Through the Law Center’s Klanwatch, Dees has tracked the growing threat of hate groups and “superpatriot” citizen militias, which he describes in a book released last month, “Gathering Storm.”

The book characterizes Randy Weaver’s Ruby Ridge standoff with federal officers as the spark of the current militia movement and details Pacific Northwest hate groups and militias, including Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake and the Militia of Montana in Noxon.

However, Dees made no mention of either group or the area in his off-the-cuff speech. He did single out Spence as an example of how militia groups can be shown the American justice system works.

Spence, who successfully defended Randy Weaver in federal court, “is such a great lawyer that he would go represent a man who in many people’s eyes might not be the person they’d want to have as their neighbor.”

Dees noted that Clarence Darrow saw how the nation’s highest ideals can be embodied in legal cases - a concept he seized on to rebut Thomas Metzger’s claim that “what makes America great is the contributions of white people.”

“The America that Tom Metzger says is so great is an America that never existed,” Dees argued.

“America is so great because of its diversity, not in spite of it.”

The new UI lawyers, he said, should also bear in mind a sense of compassion, without which they will not know justice.

“If you are to be great lawyers, take time to learn the pain, the anxiety, the fear of those people that come into your office and ask you to help them,” he said.

“…Unless you can understand that and at the same time understand your own feelings, your own pain, and where you come from as a person, you’re not going to ever have a passion for justice.”

, DataTimes