Opportunist or crusader?

By Dan Morse
ADVERTISER STAFF WRITER

February 14, 1994

Actor Corbin Bernsen's fake accent doesn't carry the richness of Morris Dees' Southern voice. And Mr. Bernsen's soft gut belies the athletic frame of his character. But overall, it's an amazing match. 

Bernsen portrays the crusading Alabama lawyer in the 1991 NBC movie "Line of Fire: the Morris Dees Story." (AKA: "Blind Hate.")Near the end of the film, the hero delivers his closing argument against the United Klans of America. He walks up to jurors, calmly tells them not to punish Klan members just because they're Klan members. He turns around and starts walking toward the Klansmen's defense table. 

"They put a rope around Michael Donald's neck. They treated him to an awful death on a dirt road in Baldwin County so they could get their message out!" he yells, slamming his hand onto the Klansmen' s courtroom table. Yes, this is television. It's television that Dees helped rewrite and approve. And it's the exact image Dees has cultivated among the more than 300,000 donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights charity he runs in downtown Montgomery. The film portrays Dees as a fearless crusader who uses the courtroom to do what the FBI and no one else can--stop hate groups. 

In real life the image is not so clear. Some who have worked with Dees call him phony, the "television evangelist" of civil rights who misleads donors into thinking the center desperately needs their money. 

Others acknowledge his long list of accomplishments but call him vindictive and two-faced, a man obsessed with grooming his image. 

"The South is a complex place," Dees wrote in 1989. "And I admit-- indeed, I hope--that I am a complex fellow."

Dees also is a giant success story--a self-made millionaire by the age of 29, a chief fundraiser for four presidential candidates, a nationally recognized civil rights lawyer.

Raised on a small cotton farm east of Montgomery in the 1940s, he went on to earn degrees at the University of Alabama. He then pursued the direct-mail trade, in which he wrote compelling, often emotional letters targeting people on select mailing lists. In the 1960s he made millions selling cookbooks, tractor cushions and other items through the mail.

Those skills attracted the attention of presidential candidates. He' s served as finance director or fundraising director for George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Edward Kennedy and Gary Hart. 

But it is Dees work at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he co- founded in 1971, that has brought him national acclaim and touched the hearts of donors throughout the nation.

In Sand Diego, for example, 75-year-old Gene Romano usually sends in $10 to $15 a year. But the Law Center recently mailed him a videotape of its work, motivating him to give more.

"Please accept my $50 check to help you in your tremendous work. ö I just wish I could afford lots more, " he wrote in a letter to Mr. Dees

In a recent interview, Mr. Romano described Mr. Dees as a crusader.

"I really like his style, Mr. Romano said.

Among those who have worked with Mr. Dees are people who should like Mr. Romano.

"Given his talent and skills and brilliance he could have picked the safe way and gone the corporate route," says Rhonda Brownstein, a center law fellow in 1986 and 1987. "That's not what he did. He's taken a very controversial and dangerous position by saying, 'I'm going to attack racists."' 

Others who have worked with Dees see him differently. 

"He fools so many people; he seems committed. But he's so dishonest, " says Courtney Mullin, who worked with Dees on criminal defense teams in the mid 1970s. "I never saw any examples of him doing something because he had a moral belief. He was simply doing things to see what he could get out of them." 

Ms. Mullin now is the chief executive officer of Barr Mullin, a Raleigh, NC, company that makes high-tech woodworking equipment.

Man of contradictions

Just as observers give contradictory opinions about Dees, there are many contradictions in the man himself.

Today, Dees is widely known as a champion of civil rights, but during the early years of the movement he remained neutral and even represented a white man who took part in the beatings that greeted freedom riders in 1961 in Montgomery.

However, through the Law Center, Dees literally has changed life for blacks in Alabama, providing more employment opportunities, political power and more say in the criminal justice system. Still some contend Dees and the center do not practice what they preach. In fact, few blacks have held high-ranking positions at the center and only one black was ever listed among the center's top money earners. 

Donald Jackson, a black former intern who now is a private attorney in Montgomery, says: 

"The perception in some circles in the black community is that of this great freedom fighter out there attempting to serve the best interests of the poor, oppressed and black. I think the reality is totally different. I think the reality--and this is not a knock against Morris personally- is that the center is guilty of some of the same things that they are out there protesting against and filing lawsuits over." 

As for Mr. Dees' personality, he can be outgoing and friendly.

"Morris can get the sweetin' out of gingerbread without breaking the crust," Klanwatch Director Danny Welch was quoted as saying in People magazine in 1991.

Mr. Dees' former business partner Millard Fuller agrees and recalls pleasurable times hunting and fishing with Mr. Dees. He's very likable. He's a friendly, out-going person, " Mr. Fuller says.

But there's another side to Mr. Dees

He currently lives with his fourth wife. His previous three marriages ended in divorce.

And at the center he doesn't tolerate dissident views, says Mr. Fuller as well as former center staffers Carolyn Caver Madzimoyo and Dennis Balske.

"He does not know how to treat people," says Mr. Fuller, now president of Habitat for Humanity International, a home-building charity. " He leaves a trail of bodies behind him, of broken relationships. It's just how he treats people."

Country boy charm

In his public image, Mr. Dees often portrays himself as a country boy with a conscience. Consider his remarks to news reporter s in Portland, Ore., after winning a $12 million judgment against Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance.

"Back home, we say it cleans his plow," he said

Home for Mr. Dees is a sprawling estate called Rolling Hills Ranch in rural Montgomery Country, a place he spoke of in he 1991 people article.

"When I'm on the trail and get stuck in those old hotels, I think about this old land," he said.

In private conversations, Mr. Dees seems just as comfortable discussing the stock market or talking Hollywood movie deals.

During an August interview with the Montgomery Advertiser, Mr. Dees discussed the marketability of a movie about Willie Edwards, a black man killed in 1957 when Klansmen allegedly force him off a Montgomery bridge.

"With this particular property where my indication so far has been we got a good chapter one and a good chapter seven but we don't have chapters two through six," said Mr. Dees , who is representing Mr. Edwards' family.

"...I'm finding little or no interest at this time because it lacks what the movie people call resolution. What is the resolution here? They didn't catch anybody. Maybe it's families reaching across racial lines. It's great Oprah Winfrey stuff. Great Donahue stuff."

Mr. Dees, a handsome man who a 1974 female juror once called "the next thing to Robert Redford," remains remarkably young looking.

At 57 he still rides his motorcycle and is inclined to start the day with 30 minutes of sit-ups and other calisthenics."

Some who know him attribute the youthful look to a face lift, which Mr. Dees denies ever took place.

Of his blond hair- which appears darker in earlier photographs- Mr. Dees says it's part of his Aryan features tat draws further rage from the white supremacists he sues.

Dismisses critics

Mr. Dees dismisses his critics as the problem. They're disgruntled. They have axes to grind, he says.

"Many people have their favorite Morris Dees story," he wrote in a letter to a reporter recently.

His supporters point to his long list of accomplishments and say it;s silly to question the sincerity of a man who has devoted the past 25 years of his life to fighting racism and poverty.

I have a lot of respect for Morris," says former center staffer Pam Horowitz. "It's real tiresome that people somehow continue to try to create controversies around him."

She was asked why people criticize Mr. Dees

"Yo mean apart from the fact that he is rich and famous and can do whatever he wants?" Ms. Horowitz re;plied "I think there's resentment. I think there's a lost of jealousy that he himself has money and that he's been extremely successful at raising money for the center and the center has a of of money." 

Mr. Dees, who says he's willed $3 million to the Law Center, has always called the shots there.

"It is his, "says Julian Bond, who held the honorary title of president at the center in the 1970s.

Mr. Dees' supporters say he always directs the center toward new and useful projects, such as Teaching Tolerance, which supplies schools throughout the nation with videotapes and other teaching tools designed to promote racial and cultural tolerance.

"He has a capacity to do an incredible amount of work," says Pat Clark, a former co-worker who now serves on the center's board of directors. "His energy is limitless. His expectations are great. Morris is a genius. He has more ideas in a half hour than most people have in a week's time."

Don't think small.

It is the Southern Poverty Law Center that most people of think of Morris Dees today.

But Mr. Dees actually started his career as a civil rights attorney several years before he formed the Law Center. Like other projects in his life, Mr. Dees Jumped into his legal career.

Morris don't think small," says one Montgomery businessman.

Of all the sacred institutions in the segregated South, Mr. Dees picked a big one- public swimming facilities.

In 1969 he sued the Montgomery YMCA on behalf of two black youths who wanted to go t summer camp. He won the suit but not before tricking the two YMCA attorneys, photocopying documents while they weren't looking and driving to a federal judge's home to tell him the YMCA board was out to get him, according to Mr. Dees recollections in "A Season for Justice," his 1991 autobiography. 

U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. didn't think much of Mr. Dees' claims against the YMCA board, but the judge ordered the YMCA to allow black memberships throughout its programs.

Today, Oakley Melton, one of the YMCA attorneys says he considers Mr. Dees a friend.

"He took unpopular causes and he brought about change, to his credit." Mr. Melton says. "His name was mud in a lot of circles.

Mr. Dees soon teamed with another young, Montgomery civil rights attorney, Joe Levin.

IN 1970 , the two joined with black lawyer Fred Gray to file a suit to create voting district that would ensure black members of the Alabama Legislature.

That suit was one of several that Mr. Dees and Mr. Levin took with them when they co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971.

"Dees' business background was the key to the Southern Poverty Law Center concept,," a center publication states. "A few important cases with the right facts could change the South, and well -conceived mailings about the cases would motivate concerned citizens to contribute money to pay the costs."

Master fund-raiser

In 1972, Mr. Dees took his direct-mail skill to Washington and revolutionized presidential campaigns.

Democratic candidate George McGovern and Mr. Dees had met through Mr. Gray's candidacy for the Alabama Legislature. Now Mr. Dees- on leave from the center- was living in Washington and sending out seven-page letters to select liberals throughout the nation, focusing on Mr. McGovern's opposition to the Vietnam War.

Using the lessons of his childhood, Mr. Dees said he wrote the McGovern letter "like the evangelist who came to summer revivals."

Money poured in- about $5 million for the primary and $20 million fro the general election. After the McGovern race, Mr. Dees returned to Montgomery.

I didn't not go home empty handed, however," he wrote

Mr. McGovern gave him a list of 700,000 names to whom the center could send its fundraising letters. More than 100,000 would become center supporters, Mr. Dees says.

Through the 1970s , Mr. Des and other center attorneys led the center to a center to a series of groundbreaking decisions.

He obtained a court order forcing Alabama state troopers to hire one black for every white until he force was 25 percent black. Center lawsuits put more blacks on Montgomery juries, forced the city of Selma to pave roads in black neighborhoods, forced the election of the first black county commissioners in Montgomery and obtained prison reforms in Alabama.

Many of the center's cases went before Judge Johnson, the famous judge know for his ground-breaking civil rights rulings. Judge Johnson remained "skeptical" about Mr. Dees, according to "Taming the Storm, The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. and the South's fight for Civil Rights," a book by journalist Jack Bass.

Judge Johnson decline to elaborate when contacted by Advertiser.

Kicked off the case

Mr. Dees says it was Dec. 1, 1974, article in the New York Times that brought the case of Joan Little to national attention. That article began:

"The ice pick slaying of Clarence Alligood, the 62-year old night jailer at the Beauford County (NC) Jail, might have appeared a simple case of murder and escape by a woman inmate except for what one law enforcement official termed the peculiarities in the way he was dressed.'"

He was wearing socks, but was otherwise naked from the waist down.

The black woman inmate represented the ideal client for the center. So Mr. Dees offered his services as an attorney and fundraiser to Little's defense team.

"Joe Levin and I had created the center to take on cases like this," Mr. Dees wrote in his autobiography. "The trial promised to raise a number of legal social issues: the right of a woman to defend herself against sexual attack; prison conditions for women (Evidence was growing that sexual abuse of women inmates was a national epidemic.); the discriminatory use of the death penalty against poor people and blacks; selection processes that failed to produce juries of true peers; and the right of a poor person to an adequate defense. But as important as these issues were, one motivation overrode all; We had to save Joan Little's life"

Mr. Dees understood this last issue better than the other defuse lawyers, according to "A True Deliverance: The Joan Little Case," by Fred Harwell.

But Mr. Dees clashed with Little's attorney and also damaged the defense's case early in the trial, according to that book.

A witness didn't not answer as Mr. Dees expected, and during a break he encouraged her to answer questions as they'd previously discussed.

Judge Hamilton Hobgood charged Mr. Dees with asking a witness to commit perjury- punishable by up to 10 years in jail- and dismissed him form the case. Charges eventually were dropped, and Mr. Dees maintains he was merely asking the witness to repeat an earlier statement.

Judge Hamilton Hobgood charged Mr. Dees with asking a witness to commit perjury- punishable by up to 10 years in jail- and dismissed him form the case. Charges eventually were dropped, and Mr. Dees maintains he was merely asking the witness to repeat an earlier statement.

The Joan Little case also was one of the most successful fund raisers in the history of the Law Center, which mailed 10.6 million letters in 1975, and took in $788,870.

"The Southern Poverty Law Center went on using Joan Little's name to raise money, taking credit for verdict but never mentioning that Morris Dees had been kicked out early in the trial," Mr. Harwell wrote.

Indeed, in a mid-1980s fundraising letter, donors were told, "The Center's attorneys successfully defended JoAnn (sic) Little in North Carolina after she was charged with murder for defending herself against a white jailer who tried to rape her."

Death penalty clash

The Joan Little case was one of Mr. Dees' many criminal defense projects. In 1976, the Law Center formed Team Defense to try a select number of death penalty cases, develop trial strategies and publish manuals for other lawyers, according to center literature of the time.

Team Defense attorneys included Mr. Dees and two Atlanta attorneys, Millard Farmer and Robert Altman.

Mr. Dees and Mr. Farmer soon clashed.

Recalls Mr. Dees, "He (Mr. Farmer) took on some 22 cases and there were a lot of cases he brought with him from a prior job he had... the program didn't ruin like he wanted it."

Mr. Dees said the project never was intended to be long term. Mr. Farmer says Mr. Dees backed off because he couldn't raise donations off the death penalty issue.

"He thought he was going to make money off it. We didn't have enough clients who were innocent. Too many bad cases," Mr. Farmer says.

Mr. Dees cut off the funding, then the two sued each other.

Eventually, the center paid Mr. Farmer about $50,000.

Mr. Farmer says he was naive. Now he says of Mr. Dees: "Making money is achievement for him. That's got to be involved in the enterprise with him. ...If you're looking at curing Morris, what you would do would have a lot of Monopoly money and let it roll in every morning in envelopes. Let him open it and put it in a bank account and say he got it.

"He's the civil right's television evangelist, Mr. Farmer says. 

Counters Mr. Dees, "Guys like Millard Farmer don't understand what we do... I wouldn't put any stock in anything Millard Farmer says about anything. He's a bitter guy."

Courtney Mullin, who served as a jury selection psychologist for Team Defense, echoes Mr. Farmer's analysis of Mr. Dees "He's not immoral, he's amoral," she says of Mr. Dees

"I hesitate to say the words that I want to say because they sound so far out, but I really think the center- in so far as Morris embodies the center- is evil," Ms. Mullin adds. "They pretend to be on a side that has moral underpinnings (but) they do damage by their dishonesty...I mean the little old lady from North Carolina sends her $5 thinking that she's going to help line the coffers of the Southern Poverty Law Center so they can the most beautiful building in the world and have all this money in the bank. That's wrong."

Mr. Altman, now an Atlanta lawyer, says he was under the impression the Team Defense project would continue for longer than it did.

"I think the intent was to have it an ongoing project," he says.

Meanwhile in Montgomery, the Law Center continued to pursue public interest litigation.

In the late 1970s the center used tow Alabama textile firms, leading to out-of-court settlements for six workers suffering from brown lung disease.

"They're one hell of a group of people, the Southern Poverty Law Center," says Opelika's Nat Wilkins, one of the victims.

A new direction

In 1979, Klan violence broke out in Greensboro, NC , and Decatur in north Alabama.

We began to get a real nasty mood in this county, on racial issues," Mr. Dees says.

He started the center's Klanwatch project in 1979, a project that proved unpopular with a number of staffers who thought Mr. Dees was moving the center away from its mission-attacking poverty and broader forms of racism in eh South- to concentrate on the fundraising gold mine of the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1986, the entire legal staff and the first director of Klanwatch had resigned.

"It was Morris' shop and no one could have input into it," former staff attorney Deborah Ellis says, If he wanted to do something, he was going to do it."

In 1987, Mr. Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klan of America after the lynching in Mobile of Michael Donald. In 1990, he won a $12.5 million judgment against Tom Metzger and his Califronia-based White Aryan Resistance (WAR). The money collected from the two cases totals about $150,000.

As he pursued the hate mongers, they turned their sights on him.

Members of the violent group The Order- who killed Denver radio disk jockey Allan Berg, a Jewish man who insulted white racists over the air- had placed Mr. Dees at the top of their list, according to the "The Silent Brotherhood," a book about the Order.

And in 1987, five men in North Carolina were indicted for hatching a plan to buy a small rocket to blow up the center and kill Mr. Dees, according to court records.

As threats mounted, Mr. Dees apparently couldn't resist the urge to marked the threat and raise more money.

In a letter several years ago, he told donors: "To give you some idea of the danger, I've enclosed a photo taken during the (Metzger) trial. It shows a machine-gun carrying member of the Portland SWAT team guarding Engeldaw Seraw, uncle of Mulugeta Seraw. Our legal team also received the same protection."

In the same letter Mr. Dees also wrote about security systems at the Law Center and said, "Your gift is needed now so we can set up this new system as soon as possible." At the time, the center had more than $33 million in reserve funds.

One of those threatening Mr. Dees was Glenn Miller, leader of a North Carolina bases hate group that Mr. Dees once described as the "fastest growing most militant racist organization in the United States."

In a bizarre story Mr. Dees recalled in his autobiography, Mr. Dees asked Miller for a lift from the Federal Courthouse in Raleigh- where he was suing Miller- to the Raleigh airport.

"He said he'd be happy to make the half-hour trip," Mr. Dees wrote.

Mr. Dees says he was nervous when Mr. Milled passed the airport entrance.

"Unarmed, I braced myself hit him if he made a move," Mr. Dees wrote. "The only move made was to turn the car around. He had simply missed the entrance. 'Morris , you know, I kind of like you,' he said as he pulled in the airport. 'I'm going to tell you something. There are some people out there who want to kill you. You better be careful, friend.'"

Ms. Ellis says, "I sometimes thought that Morris liked the kind of cops and robbers aspect of dealing with the Klan. That it was kind of fun to all this danger."

Adds Mr. Fuller, the Habitat for Humanity president, "Morris would like to be known as a crusader. The Klan is something that's known and feared by a lot of people and (Mr. Dees wants) to be known as the person who did 'em serious harm."

Subject of praise Mr. Dees has received national acclaim for defeating white supremacist in the courtroom . He's won several national awards, including the 1987 Trial Lawyers of the Year award from Ralph Nader's Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

Public television aired a documentary of Mr. Dees' successful lawsuit against Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance

The attention has helped him win Mr. Dees a devoted following among center supporters.

Mr. Ashworth, the center's executive director, supplied the Advertiser with four letter to Mr. Dees from supporters; In one letter, a California woman asked Mr. Dees to write a Christmas card to her father, who was dying of cancer and was a great admirer of Mr. Dees.

The letter was among hundreds of complimentary letters that arrive each month, Mr. Ashworth said.

A continuous stream of positive media accounts had added to the Dees legend.

A four-page People magazine article on July 7, 1991, led off by calling Mr. Dees "a wily Alabamian who uses the courts to wipe out hate groups and racial violence."

Pictured on the last page are Mr. Dees and his wife feeding an injured bird with an eye-dropper.

In 1991, NBC aired "Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story."

Among the millions watching the movie was a small group of former c enter employees gathered at the New York home Ms. Ellis, one of the former staff attorneys who left the center in 1986 after disagreeing with Mr. Dees so the direction of the center.

"We had fun." Ms. Ellis recalls about the movie gathering. "We had Southern food: Boiled shrimp and Vodka tonics."

The staffers laughed over what they perceived were the inaccuracies in the movie, Ms. Ellis said.

"I remember we were laughing so loud that my husband got mad because he couldn't watch the movie," she said.

Also in 1991, Mr. Dees' autobiography was published.

Mr. Dees sent autographed copies to friends and former colleagues throughout the nation.

In the 337-page book, Mr. Dees writes in great detail about portions of his life, but makes no mention of his third wife, Mary Farmer, who he married in 1980.