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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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 Year in Hate and Extremism 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.
   
• 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 Teaching Tolerance magazine, attend trainings and webinars, use its lessons and frameworks in the classroom and participate in its social media community.
   
• 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.

“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.

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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center