Targeted By Hate Groups, Dees Also Has Their Number Legal War Punctuated By Name Calling, Firebombing

Morris Dees is the No. 1 assassination target of violent white supremacists. They hate him as much as the New World Order.

But their threats, name-calling and even a firebombing of Dees’ office in Montgomery, Ala., haven’t stopped his legal war against white supremacy groups and their leaders.

His legal work, many say, makes him the pre-eminent civil rights lawyer in the United States. Some call him a latter-day Clarence Darrow.

Life magazine listed Dees as one of 1998’s “Heroes of the Year” for his legal accomplishments.

Now, he’s coming to North Idaho to battle Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations in a Coeur d’Alene courtroom.

The 62-year-old co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery is the mastermind behind a civil suit filed Monday that will attempt to bankrupt the Aryan Nations.

The lawsuit should be legendary, costly and contentious.

Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center have run other white supremacy organizations out of business with similar lawsuits.

The Aryan Nations suit is the sixth major case of its kind brought by Dees.

He hasn’t lost one yet.

Dees and Poverty Law Center attorneys, including chief counsel Richard Cohen, represent without charge people who have been victims of racially motivated crimes.

Just last summer, Dees won a $37.8 million judgment in South Carolina against a Ku Klux Klan group responsible for burning down a predominately black church. The verdict against the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan included $15 million in punitive damages.

“That jury decision was a day of reckoning for the Klan,” Dees said after the trial ended. “The verdict shows that there are still some things sacred in the country, still some lines that no one can cross.”

Dees doesn’t talk about his cases until they’ve been decided by a jury.

He doesn’t grant interviews before or during a trial, and deliberately attempts to keep a low profile.

For the Aryan Nations case, he collaborated with Coeur d’Alene attorney Norm Gissel, a long-time civil rights activist and unabashed admirer of Dees.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be trying a case with Morris Dees,” said Gissel, a life-long Idaho resident.

Dees was born in 1936 in Shorter, Ala., the son of a farmer and cotton gin operator. His grandfather was in the Ku Klux Klan.

His parents didn’t question segregation, but both treated blacks and minorities with genuine respect, Dees wrote in his autobiography, “A Season for Justice.”

His mother, Dees writes, invited black friends to sit at the family dinner table as she helped them fill out paperwork for public assistance.

As a boy growing up in the South, Dees recalls, he received a whipping from his father for calling a field hand a “nigger.”

Dees was active in agriculture during high school and was honored in 1955 by the Alabama Future Farmers of America.

He sold watermelons and chickens to help pay his way to the University of Alabama, but agriculture wasn’t his calling.

He dabbled in politics and worked in 1958 for populist Alabama gubernatorial candidate George Wallace. Soon, the two Alabamians became diametrically opposed.

Once in college, Dees started a direct-mail birthday cake business.

Later, while attending law school, he founded a nationwide direct-mail book publishing company. He also became increasingly active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Before he turned 30, Dees was a millionaire.

His business success led him to become finance director for the presidential campaigns of McGovern in 1972, Carter in 1976 and Kennedy in 1980.

Dees sold his mail-order business for $6 million in 1969 to the Times-Mirror Co. Dees said the “pulls and tugs of my conscience” plunged him full-time into civil rights law.

By 1970, he began forming the Southern Poverty Law Center with Joseph Levin Jr. Dees used his direct-mail talents to build the center’s endowment, which today exceeds $63 million. The center has a staff of 55.

The center’s first office in Montgomery was firebombed in 1983, and there have been several serious attempts to kill Dees.

Beyond the threats on his life, Dees has developed his share of other critics, too.

He is twice divorced, and legal papers from those proceedings are widely distributed by white supremacists, looking to sweep dirt his way.

The daily newspaper in his hometown, the Montgomery Advertiser, also has published unflattering stories about Dees and the Poverty Law Center. In 1992 the newspaper ran articles questioning why there were no blacks in the center’s top management.

And the center and Dees have been criticized for using hate crimes against minorities to solicit donations for the Poverty Law Center.

Dees brushes off the criticism and says his record shows his life-long commitment to civil rights.