Morris Dees

Morris Dees has incurred the wrath and hatred of many, if not most, on the extreme right of the American political spectrum. A native Alabamian, born in 1936 in Shorter in Macon County, Dees has noted that he grew up in an era, and in a region, where racial prejudice and white supremacy were accepted as an everyday fact of life, and in his youth he, as did virtually everyone else in the South, saw nothing wrong with it. As he grew older, however, the virulent strains of racism he saw every day began to work on him, and when he himself began to be subject to racial and religious slurs and epithets hurled at him because he was a Jew in the Deep South, he began to change his way of thinking. Shortly after graduation from the University of Alabama Law School, he and several others, including future civil-rights activist and political leader Julian Bond, founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, which specializes in lawsuits involving civil rights violations, domestic terrorist activities an