How The Southern Poverty Law Center Started Inventing ‘Hate Groups’

Journalist Tyler O'Neil's new book, 'Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,' is a long-overdue exposé of the corruption of at the undeservedly influential civil rights organization.

On March 14, 2019 the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly fired its founder and long-time leader Morris Dees on accusations of racial and sexual discrimination, and announced it would bring in outside assistance to investigate the climate of the organization Dees had built and ruled over for almost half a century.

Since its founding, the SPLC had been treated — at least in the mainstream media — as an unquestioned arbiter of what qualifies as racism and hatred. Being added to the SPLC’s “Hate List” was the death-knell for any number of organizations that ran afoul of Dees.

In the earliest days of the SPLC, the Alabama-based civil rights law firm did target truly racist and hateful groups, most famously the United Klans of America, which the SPLC devastated in a successful lawsuit it launched in 1984. The result was financial largesse. Money flowed into the SPLC, driven by Dees’s brilliance for direct-mail campaigning and the hope of white liberals that a strong SPLC would mean the end to racism and hatred in America.

But to keep the money flowing, the SPLC kept insisting hate groups and white supremacy were expanding. To do this, an ever-widening definition of hatred was required. The SPLC expanded its list of “hate groups” to include not just the shrinking numbers of vile KKK and neo-Nazi groups, but groups that were merely controversial and even harmless.

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