[Peace-discuss] Re: [Peace] Morris Dees Lecture 12/9/2003

[Morton K.Brussel]

FYI. Other views of Morris Dees appended:

MKB


 
+ NEA Selects Morris Dees as Friend of Education. The National 
Education Association has selected Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty 
Law Center (SPLC) as its 2001 Friend of Education, an award previously 
given to such luminaries as Senators Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham 
Clinton. It will be interesting to see what the selection of Dees, 
often credited with putting the Ku Klux Klan out of business in 
Alabama, has upon the avowed leftists among NEA’s delegates, who are 
far from one mind about Dees’s achievements.

For at least six years, noted left-wing journalists such as Alexander 
Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair and Ken Silverstein have criticized Dees as 
someone who fills his own pockets while "frightening elderly liberals 
into ponying up contributions with the fantasy that the heirs to Adolf 
Hitler are about to come marching down Main Street, lynching blacks and 
putting the Jews into gas ovens."

Harper’s published a piece in November 2000 entitled "The Church of 
Morris Dees" in which Silverstein quotes a former Dees associate 
calling Dees "the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights 
movement, though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." 
Silverstein writes that the SPLC has an endowment of over $120 million, 
but spends twice as much on fund-raising as it does on legal services 
for victims of civil rights abuses. Dees himself made $273,000 in 1999 
and was named to the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame.

In The New York Press last January, Cockburn called Dees and the SPLC 
"collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life," and quoted 
a former Dees partner as saying that the SPLC was "little more than a 
900 number." Cockburn also cited an SPLC "special report" which claimed 
the groups that put together the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations, 
including environmental groups and labor unions, had been infiltrated 
by "the hard-edged soldiers of neofascism."
On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:14 AM, John Fettig wrote:

> http://www.iuboard.uiuc.edu/Calendar/detail.asp?iEve=80&iType=945
> Event: Morris Dees - Lecture
> Dated: 12/9/2003
> Location: Foellinger Auditorium
> Detail: Morris Dees - civil rights attorney
> 7pm (doors open at 6:00)
>
> FREE ADMISSION
>
> Morris Dees is a civil liberties and rights activist who sues KKK and
> aryan nation members in order to bankrupt their chapters.
>
>
>
> This event is put on by the IUB Lectures Committee.
>
>
>
> -- 
> You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough 
> to
> eat six. -- Yogi Berra
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