Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
name	Morris Dees
residence	Montgomery, Alabama
birth name	Morris Seligman Dees, Jr.
birth date	December 16, 1936
birth place	Shorter, Alabama
occupation	civil rights and social justice activist
religion	Unitarian
spouse	}}

Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is the co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a former direct mail marketeer for book publishing. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., Dees founded the SPLC in 1971, the start of a legal career dedicated to suing racist organizations and other controversial discrimination cases.

Agricultural and business background

Dees was born to a farming family in Alabama in 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.

Civil rights legal practice

In 1969, Dees filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA. Dees' new legal firm began taking part in 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.

In an address on March 1, 2007, at the University of Texas School of Law, Judge Keith Ellison described Morris Dees as “his generation's most valiant and effective soldier in the fight for civil rights and civil liberties.”

Innovative legal strategy

Dees was one of the principal architects of an innovative strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure a court judgment for money damages against an organization for a wrongful act and then use the courts to seize its assets (money, land, buildings, other property) to pay the judgment.

SPLC lawyers used this legal strategy to hold the Klan accountable for the acts of its members. In 1981, Dees successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and won a $7 million judgment for the mother of Michael Donald, a black lynching victim in Alabama. Payment of the judgment bankrupted the United Klans of America and resulted in its national headquarters being sold to help satisfy the judgment. All funds secured in this manner were paid to the family of the deceased.

A decade later, in 1991, Dees obtained a judgment of $12 million against Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance. He was also instrumental in securing a $6.5 million judgment against Aryan Nations in 2001. Dees' most famous cases have involved landmark damage awards that have driven several prominent neo-Nazi groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband and re-organize under different names and different leaders.

Dees' legal actions against racial nationalist groups have made him a target of criticism from many of these organizations. He has received numerous death threats from these groups, and a number of their web sites make strong accusations against him and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Over 30 people have been jailed in connection with plots to kill Dees or blow up the center. Most recently a July 29, 2007, letter allegedly came from Hal Turner, a radio talk show host, paid FBI informant and white supremacist, after the SPLC filed a lawsuit against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, Kentucky. During the IKA trial a former member of the IKA said that the Klan head told him to kill Dees.

Dees' work was featured on the National Geographic's "Inside American Terror" in 2008. The story of Dees' campaigns against white supremacist hate groups was fictionalized in a 1991 TV movie entitled ''Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story.'' Over the last several years, Dees has presented numerous lectures on civil rights and justice at universities. In 2009, he was the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony for San Francisco State University.

Morris Dees Justice Award

In 2006, the law firm of Skadden Arps Meagher & Flom partnered with the University of Alabama School of Law to create the Morris Dees Justice Award in honor of Dees, an Alabama graduate, for his lifelong dedication to public service. The award is given annually to a lawyer who has "devoted his or her career to serving the public interest and pursuing justice, and whose work has brought positive change in the community, state or nation," as illustrated by the lives of the following recipients.

The first recipient of the award was U. S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, of the Eastern District of Texas, who received it November 16, 2006 at a ceremony in Skadden offices in New York City. Judge Justice was recognized for his lifelong efforts to protect civil rights and safeguard constitutional rights during more than 30 years as a federal district judge, hearing notable cases dealing with integration, prisoners' rights (Ruiz v. Estelle, 1972), procedural due process, equal access to education (United States v. Texas, 1970), free public education for children of illegal immigrants (Plyer v. Doe, 1982), dilution of voting rights, and care for the mentally challenged.

In 2007, the award was presented to Arthur N. Read, general counsel for Friends of Farmworkers, Inc., a legal services provider in Philadelphia, for dedicating his career and life to providing a voice for the disadvantaged and advocating on behalf of the underprivileged. In Vlasic Farms, Inc. v. Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board (2001), he won for workers in Pennsylvania's mushroom industry the right to organize, and in El Concilia v. DER (1984), Read won a class-action lawsuit arguing that Pennsylvania had failed to inspect migrant camp housing for workers, bringing such housing largely into compliance with state and federal law.

Also in 2007, civil rights attorney Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights, in a letter to Kenneth C. Randall (Dean of Law School at the University of Alabama), declined an invitation to the Morris Dees Justice Award presentation, characterized Dees as "a fraud and a con man", and criticized the award, writing "The award does not recognize the work of others by associating them with Dees; it promotes Dees by associating him with the honorees. Both the law school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another Dees scam."" The letter was published in ''Harper's Magazine'' November 2, 2007.

In 2008, the award went to immigrant rights advocate Cheryl Little, Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, a non-profit legal assistance organization in Miami, for her dedication to protecting the rights of immigrants, especially Haitian refugees, throughout her professional career. Little is considered one of the country’s leading experts on immigration law.

Political activity

He served as Senator George McGovern's national finance director in 1972, 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. Dees ran for the board of the Sierra Club as a protest candidate in 2004, qualifying by petition. His campaign was not designed to win election, but to publicize the views of some board members and candidates running for election in a bid to return population control to the organization's agenda. Dees received 7554 votes, coming in 16th out of 17 candidates in the election.

The Dees 1991 autobiography ''A Season for Justice'' was updated in 2003 with new material about his case against the Aryan Nations in Idaho and reissued as ''A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story'' in a biographical series published by the American Bar Association.

Bibliography

Dees, Morris and Steve Fiffer (2003). ''A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story''. Chicago: American Bar Association. ISBN 1-57073-994-3.

Dees, Morris (1997). ''Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat''. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-092789-5.

Dees, Morris, and Steve Fiffer. (1993) ''Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi''. New York: Villard Books. ISBN 0-679-40614-X.

Footnotes

References

Dees, Morris, and Steve Fiffer. 1991. ''A Season For Justice,'' (Dees' autobiography) New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-19189-X

Hall, Dave, Tym Burkey and Katherine M. Ramsland. 2008. ''Into the Devil’s Den''. New York: Ballantine. ISBN 978-0-345-49694-2

External links

Official

Southern Poverty Law Center – Official website

Morris Dees: Center founder and chief trial counsel – Official website

Morris Dees Award – Official website

Other

Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story (a television movie)

A 2004 video of Morris delivering the keynote address at the Minnesota Human Rights Day celebration

Commencement address at DePauw University; May 19, 2001

The My Hero Project: Morris Seligman Dees

Category:1936 births Category:Living people

Category:African Americans' rights activists Category:American activists Category:American campaign managers Category:American civil rights lawyers Category:American Unitarians Category:Anti-racism activists Category:People from Montgomery, Alabama Category:Southern Poverty Law Center Category:University of Alabama School of Law alumni