SPLC at 50: A history of fighting for justice and racial equity, a new
course for the future
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Read the full piece here
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Friend,
Joe Levin was in junior high school the year that Rosa Parks took a
stand against racial segregation on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama,
sparking a yearlong bus boycott that would serve as a catalyst for the
civil rights movement.
It was 1955 and Levin was largely oblivious to the tectonic shifts
shaking the very foundations of the South and his hometown, known as
the Cradle of the Confederacy. But that all changed seven years later
when his Jewish fraternity brothers at the University of Alabama woke
up one morning to find a burning cross on their lawn. It had been
planted by members of the United Klans of America after a fraternity
member wrote a newspaper editorial calling for the University of
Mississippi to admit a Black student, James Meredith.
"Prior to that time, I saw myself as a white Southerner,"
Levin later recalled. "I had not experienced that kind of naked
hatred. Once my eyes were opened, I couldn't ignore others who
were persecuted around me. What I had learned about my life was
wrong."
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After law school, Levin served two years in the Army, returned to
Montgomery and not long afterward started a firm with another young
lawyer, Morris Dees, who had just won a highly publicized case that
forced the local YMCA to allow Black children in its swimming pools
and other facilities.
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The law firm Levin & Dees found immediate success.
After winning a substantial fee in an early lawsuit, the two lawyers
were able to finance a series of civil rights cases. They sued the
local newspaper for printing the wedding announcements of Black
couples on the Thursday "Negro news" page rather than
alongside white couples' announcements in the Sunday society
pages. They successfully brought suit to change an electoral system
that ensured Alabama's legislature would remain virtually all
white. They forced the integration of the Alabama state trooper force,
whose officers had brutally attacked voting rights marchers on the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. And they won a landmark decision by the
U.S. Supreme Court that required the Defense Department to provide
servicewomen with the same benefits to which men were entitled.
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It wasn't long before both men knew they had found their
calling. They wanted to dedicate their careers to taking on tough
cases that could make a difference in the lives of people facing
discrimination across the South - lawsuits that few other
private lawyers would take on. So to continue representing clients who
couldn't pay, in July 1971, with the help and encouragement of
the late Julian Bond, they incorporated a new nonprofit entity -
the Southern Poverty Law Center. They hired a small staff and from
then on never charged another client for their services.
That was 50 years ago. In the following decades, with the financial
support of hundreds of thousands of compassionate people across the
country, the SPLC won case after case - helping to stamp out
remnants of Jim Crow segregation, putting violent white supremacist
groups like the United Klans of America out of business, and
protecting the rights of communities of color, children, women, people
with disabilities, migrant workers and immigrants, LGBTQ people and
others who faced discrimination and exploitation.
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"In the beginning, we were using the courts to enforce the civil
rights laws enacted in the 1960s, with the aim of helping to make the
promise of the civil rights movement a reality in the South,"
Levin said. "Even though Congress had passed the Civil Rights
and Voting Rights acts a few years earlier, legal action was still
needed to root out the remnants of Jim Crow segregation that were so
deeply embedded in the laws, culture and customs of the South."
As it grew in size and stature, the SPLC continued to litigate
groundbreaking civil rights cases but blazed new paths as well:
* Amid a resurgence of the Klan in the 1980s, the organization
launched Klanwatch (now the Intelligence Project), an
investigative unit dedicated to tracking and exposing the
activities of white supremacist and other hate groups. In 1990,
it began conducting an annual census of hate groups operating
across the country and plotting their locations on the Hate Map.
That operation continues today with a staff of investigators,
analysts and journalists who report their findings on the
SPLC's Hatewatch blog and an annual
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Year in Hate and Extremism
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report.
* In 1989, the SPLC dedicated the Civil Rights Memorial, designed
by Maya Lin, at its headquarters in Montgomery to memorialize
the martyrs killed in the civil rights movement - and 16
years later added an educational component by opening the Civil
Rights Memorial Center, which draws thousands of schoolchildren
and others each year to learn about the struggle for civil
rights.
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* To promote multicultural education and the celebration of
difference, in 1991 the SPLC introduced Teaching Tolerance (now
Learning for Justice) to create anti-bias films, books,
curricula and other resources for the classroom and distribute
them, free of charge, to K-12 teachers across the country.
Today, the Learning for Justice (LFJ) community includes more
than half a million educators who screen the LFJ's
classroom films, read
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Teaching Tolerance
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magazine, attend trainings and webinars, use its lessons and
frameworks in the classroom and participate in its social media
community.
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* In the early 2000s, the SPLC created a new legal team to fight
for the rights of foreign guest workers and secured a series of
reforms and multimillion-dollar verdicts on behalf of thousands
of men and women who were being trafficked, abused and exploited
by unscrupulous employers. A few years later, that team began
another project: the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative,
which brings SPLC lawyers and volunteers from across the country
together to provide free legal representation to immigrants
unfairly trapped in five of the largest detention centers in the
South.
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"None of us knew when we started the SPLC, of course, that our
tiny law firm would have such a positive impact on the lives of so
many people and grow into the dynamic, multifaceted organization that
it is today," said Levin, who is retired but remains as an
emeritus member of the SPLC Board of Directors.
READ MORE
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond,
working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,
strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of
all people.
DONATE
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