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Civil Rights Movement Series

Morris Dees Jr.: Founding the Southern Poverty Law Center

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Date and time
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Morris Dees Jr. discusses the founding of the Southern Poverty Law Center and talks about his experience with this group. **Morris Dees Jr.** is famous for his crusade against white supremacist hate groups, and known for his landmark cases, which forced groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Neo-Nazis to disband. Dees' work has been fictionalized in a 1991 movie called *Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story*, as well as in numerous books.

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Civil rights lawyer Morris Dees Jr. developed an innovative legal strategy that sought to achieve what some legal scholars would have thought impossible: the leadership of racist organizations would be held accountable for the violent consequences of their activities. In 1987, he used the strategy in a $7 million wrongful death suit against the United Klans of America, charging that its message of racial hatred and violence inspired two Klan members to lynch a young, mobile, Alabama black man. Dees won, and the local Klan was bankrupted.
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