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30 November 2005 Civil-rights lawyer Morris Dees to speak at Longwood’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day program
Dees, the co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center, will speak Thursday, Jan. 19, at 3:30 p.m. in Jarman Auditorium. The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium is free and open to the public, although everyone, including members of the Longwood community, will need to obtain tickets, now available, in advance at the Jarman Box Office. Some 125 tickets are being reserved for the community. Dees has been credited with bankrupting white supremacist organizations, imprisoning perpetrators of hate crimes, increasing awareness of radical militias and spreading the message of tolerance. The son of a tenant farmer, he grew up near Montgomery, Alabama, where he opened a law practice in 1960 after graduating from the University of Alabama law school. He also ran a highly successful direct mail company that specialized in book publishing, which he’d started as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. Despite sympathizing with the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, he didn’t become actively involved. However, after what he later described as “a night of soul searching at a snowed-in Cincinnati airport,” he decided in 1967 to sell his company and specialize in civil-rights law. He sold the company two years later and in 1971, with law partner Joseph Levin Jr. and Julian Bond, now NAACP chairman, used the revenue from the sale to found the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Dees then began taking controversial cases that were highly unpopular in the white community. The nonprofit SPLC, based in Montgomery, specializes in lawsuits involving civil-rights violations, domestic terrorism and racially-motivated crimes. It has won 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,” according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. “Morris Dees epitomizes the citizen leader,” said Lonnie Calhoun, Longwood’s director of multicultural affairs and a member of the planning committee for his visit. “He has remained in Montgomery and used his money to support his organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center does excellent advocacy work, including internship opportunities and programs on teaching tolerance. Citizenship is a verb, and it requires action. You can’t be a citizen and not move.” Dees is the author of three books: the autobiography A Season for Justice (re-released as A Lawyer’s Journey: The Morris Dees Story), Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, and Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. He has received numerous awards, been awarded at least 25 honorary degrees, and was featured in the 1991 TV film Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story. |
Civil-rights lawyer and activist Morris Dees, whose organization has achieved landmark decisions and crippling civil judgments against hate groups, will be the speaker for Longwood University’s observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.