Friend,  

In the house in Greenville, South Carolina, that Karen Baynes-Dunning calls home, a sunny room is scattered with squares and ribbons and swaths of fabric — strands of the vibrant quilts this native of the South crafts for the people she holds dear.

Quilting might seem too quiet a pursuit for a woman who first became cognizant of racism as a kindergartener, who rallied for racial justice as a Black campus leader at a Southern university where the Confederate flag still flew and who, as a pathbreaking lawyer, judge, social justice activist and advocate for children and families, has dedicated her career to improving the quality of life of disadvantaged children.

But Baynes-Dunning, who this fall became the first Black woman elected chair of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s board of directors, has made a life of joining pieces together.

“She is always quilting, in both a literal and figurative way,” said Neil Stanley Henriques, an attorney in Washington, D.C., who has been a close friend of Baynes-Dunning since their freshman year at Wake Forest University. “She’s always knitting or stitching what seems to be jumbled or disparate or things that don’t fit together and finding a way to make them fit and unite them. So much of what her life’s work is about, quite frankly, is quilting. That’s who she is and that’s what she loves to do.”

In Baynes-Dunning’s new role at the head of the SPLC’s 13-member board, there is much stitching to be done. Since April 2020, when Margaret Huang moved from a leadership position at Amnesty International to take over as SPLC president and CEO, the organization has been reimagining its mission. Building on its half-century of landmark legal victories against discrimination, inequality and white supremacist groups, the SPLC is working more closely than ever in partnership with local communities, dedicating itself to supporting the ground-level work of grassroots organizers and evolving into a more powerful advocate than ever for human rights, civil rights and voting rights for all people.

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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center

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