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Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees

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Ptarmigan:
Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/03/14/southern-poverty-law-center-fires-co-founder-civil-rights-lawyer-morris-dees/3164839002/


--- Quote ---The Southern Poverty Law Center fired Morris Dees, the nonprofit civil rights organization's co-founder and former chief litigator.

SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement Dees' dismissal over his misconduct was effective on Wednesday, March 13. When pressed for details on what led to the termination, the organization declined to elaborate.

"As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world," Cohen said in the emailed statement. "When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action."
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The founder of SPLC, Morris Dees, has been fired.

Probably sexual harassment.

Ptarmigan:
The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris-dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center

SPLC has some skeletons in the closet.


--- Quote ---In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a ****ing monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.
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--- Quote ---For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.
--- End quote ---

Accusations of racism and sexual harassment within the SPLC. It was an open secret.

Ptarmigan:
SPLC fires founder Morris Dees; internal emails highlight issues with harassment, discrimination
https://www.alreporter.com/2019/03/15/splc-fires-founder-morris-dees-internal-emails-highlight-issues-with-harassment-discrimination/


--- Quote ---The Southern Poverty Law Center on Thursday announced that it had fired Morris Dees, the center’s co-founder and long-time public face of the civil rights organization, amid undisclosed allegations that Dees failed to meet the standards of the SPLC.
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Internal e-mail reveals racism and sexism in the SPLC.

--- Quote ---But internal emails obtained by APR related to Dees’ firing appear to show that the problems — which employees said spanned from sexual harassment to gender- and race-based discrimination — were more systemic and widespread, creating an atmosphere over several years in which female and minority employees felt mistreated. The employees also said that they felt their complaints were either not heard or resulted in retaliation from senior staff.

The spark that ignited the near-mutiny at SPLC appears to have been the resignation of senior attorney Meredith Horton, and an email she sent to senior leadership. That email noted the hardships women and employees of color faced at SPLC. It was forwarded by Cohen to all staff with a message that there would be a commitment within SPLC to address those concerns.
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J P Sousa:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-stossel-the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-a-money-grabbing-slander-machine

--- Quote ---Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, where she suffered female genital mutilation. So now she speaks out against radical Islam. For that, SPLC put her on its list of dangerous "extremists."
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--- Quote ---Years ago, Harper's Magazine reported that SPLC was "the wealthiest civil rights group in America, one that now spend most of its time -- and money -- on a fund-raising campaign." People in Montgomery, Alabama, where SPLC is based, call its elegant new headquarters "the Poverty Palace."
--- End quote ---

https://www.lasvegasnow.com/news/national/watchdog-groups-leader-steps-down-after-founders-firing/1870139119

--- Quote ---MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - The head of the Southern Poverty Law Center on Friday announced that he is stepping down, the latest high-profile departure from the watchdog organization best known for its work monitoring extremist groups.

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen sent an email to staff saying that he would be stepping down from his leadership role at the organization.

--- End quote ---

Maybe now the Hate Group The Southern Poverty Law Center will finally get their due.

DumbAss Tanker:
The SPLC has been nothing but an industrial-grade extortion machine with a side of propaganda mill for years, this is long overdue.

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