A Passion For Justice Lawyer Fights Hate In The Courtroom

Morris Dees said there is a black woman in Mobile, Ala., everybody can learn from.

Beulah Mae Donald showed the civil rights attorney the importance of forgiveness. She also helped him understand his passion for justice.

In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America for the 1981 lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald of Mobile.

During the trial, one of two Klansmen who committed the crime approached Donald and asked her “if she had it in her heart to forgive him.”

“Ms. Donald responded, ‘Son, I’ve already forgiven you,”’ Dees said. “She recognized a victim of racial hatred because she was one.”

Michael was her only son.

Dees, co-founder and chief counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is credited with the strategy of bankrupting hate groups by winning large civil verdicts on behalf of victims of hate crimes.

He’s in Spokane this weekend for the Northwest Coalition against Malicious Harassment conference held this year at Gonzaga University.

He gave the Luvera Lecture on Friday night at the Davenport Hotel. The event was sponsored by the university’s law school.

Before tight security, Dees spoke about “A Passion for Justice” before roughly 500 people in the hotel lobby.

The 7:30 p.m. lecture started almost 30 minutes late because of security checks at the door.

After receiving a standing ovation from the audience, Dees said it troubles him to see his profession get bashed by media and public.

He referred to a cable news channel’s recent examination of the legal field. The show examined why attorneys are viewed by the public as unsavory people in an unsavory business.

During the program, one interviewer quoted a line from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” and suggested “killing all the lawyers,” Dees said.

Dees later contacted the show’s host and told him it was important to consider the entire text of the quote: “If tyranny is to prevail you must first kill all the lawyers.”

And the desire to end tyranny is what should be at the heart of the profession, he said.

“The thing that usually determines the winner in a case is the passion for justice.”

Dees also talked about his 1990 civil victory against the White Aryan Resistance Group for its role in the 1988 murder of an Ethiopian exchange student in Portland.

Dees used a young male white supremacist who had been convicted of beating the exchange student as a star witness in a civil case against Tom Metzger.

“I brought him on down to Alabama and fed him some grits, showed him some alligators and got him to see things my way,” Dees said.

Metzger asked that he not be held liable for the beating death because of his beliefs. He had stated that the contributions of whites and whites only are what make America great.

But Dees countered by saying that the contributions of Jonas Salk, the Jewish doctor who discovered penicillin, and others like Leonard Bernstein and Colin Powell also helped make America the nation it has always striven to be.

“The America Tom Metzger believed in is an America that never existed,” Dees said.

Before the lecture, Dees was presented with the Gonzaga Law Medal.

After it was placed around his neck, he said, “Normally I don’t take kindly to people putting things around my neck.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo