http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm
When a hate crime is something to love
Black pain and white piety is a winning combination in contemporary
America, as any number of phony liberals have demonstrated over the years.
Nobody manipulates this combination better than Morris Dees. Few do it as
well.
Racism in America has become big business, real and otherwise, which is
no doubt why Bill Clinton, who got caught several years ago peddling a phony
story about church-burning in Arkansas, says he'll be getting into it from
his $700,000-a-year offices in midtown Manhattan. The appetite for sensation,
even when it is half-baked sensation, is insatiable, and Morris Dees could
show him how to profit from it.
Mr. Dees is a lawyer in Montgomery, Ala., who is the "national chairman"
of something called the Southern Poverty Law Center, which sounds like the
hide-out of a noble band of warriors against hate crime and other racial
wrongs, but is actually a fund-raising scheme that could teach televangelists
a thing or two.
In fact, maybe it has. Morris Dees, says his former partner, "is the Jim
and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement, though I don't mean to
malign Jim and Tammy Faye."
Mr. Dees took in $44 million from gullible contributors, mostly white,
in 1999 and spent $13 million actually trying to help the poor and beaten
down, mostly black, fight for their civil rights. He has been well known for
years to reporters in the South, most of whom have never written much about
who he really is. Mr. Dees, like the late I.F. Stone or the living Jesse
Jackson, became a pet rock of the media, engaged in a calling so noble that
it is regarded as tasteless, or at least suicidal, to notice that he runs
around naked. The Rev. Billy Don Moyers endorses his fund-raising schemes, so
what else does anyone need to know?
Ken Silverstein recently told another version of the Morris Dees story
in Harper's magazine, and it's a tale well told.
What captured Mr. Silverstein's attention is the most recent project of
the Dees "law center," a kit called "Teaching Tolerance" that is available
for only $30 on the Dees Web site, with the firm but meaningless assurance
that's it's "a $325 value." (Why not $425? $525?)
What the buyer gets is a compendium of hate crimes that any casual
newspaper reader already knows about, described in vivid ink of a purple hue,
spreading the alarm that the Ku Klux Klan, heavily armed white-citizen
militias and six Nazi Panzer divisions that never made it to Omaha Beach are
bearing down on Cleveland, or maybe Providence. Even a journalist for the 11
O'clock Eyeball News on Channels 3 through 10 would blush twice trying to
peddle stuff like this.
Then we get the dirty little secret of hate-crime reporting. "Horrifying
as such incidents are," writes Mr. Silverstein, "hate groups commit almost no
violence. More than 95 percent of all 'hate crimes,' including most of the
incidents [Mr. Dees] cites (bombings, church burnings, school shootings) are
perpetrated by 'lone wolves.' " Indeed, membership in the Ku Klux Klan, which
is the most lucrative Dees fund-raising target, has shrunk so dramatically
that the Klan would have been out of business years ago but for FBI
infiltration. In some chapters the only members with paid-up dues are FBI
informants.
In one case cited by Mr. Silverstein, Morris Dees won a judgment for a
black woman whose son was killed by Klansmen. She received $51,875 as
settlement. Mr. Dees, according to an investigation by the Montgomery
Advertiser, pulled in $9 million from fund-raising solicitation letters that
featured a particularly gruesome photograph of the grieving mother's son. Mr.
Dees, who pays himself an annual salary of $275,000, offered the grieving
mother none of the $9 million her son's death made for him.
Mr. Dees, in fact, earns — or is paid, which is not necessarily the same
thing — more than nearly any officer of other advocacy groups surveyed by the
National Journal, more than the chairmen of the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund and the Children's Defense Fund.
"You are a fraud and a con man," Stephen Bright, director of the
Southern Center for Human Rights, which actually takes on dozens of
death-penalty appeals for poor blacks every year, once told him. "You spend
so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly."
Mr. Dees does not take death-penalty cases because this might scare off
contributors in safe white liberal neighborhoods, many of whom imagine that
the death penalty keeps black robbers, rapists and murderers off their
streets. White guilt can be manipulated with black pain, but it has to be
done carefully. It's a sordid scam. Some people would call what Morris Dees
does a hate crime, but it's a living, and a very good one.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
