Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC is an American Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., & Julian Bond in 1971 as the civil rights law firm in Montgomery. Bond served as president of a board between 1971 in addition to 1979.

In 1980, the SPLC began a litigation strategy of filing civil suits for monetary damages on behalf of the victims of violence from the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC also became involved in other civil rights causes, including cases to challenge what it sees as institutional racial segregation and discrimination, inhumane and unconstitutional conditions in prisons and detention centers, discrimination based on sexual orientation, mistreatment of illegal immigrants, and the unconstitutional mixing of church and state. The SPLC has shown information approximately hate groups to the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

Since the 2000s, the SPLC's style and listings of hate groups organizations it has assessed either "attack or malign an entire a collection of things sharing a common attribute of people, typically for their immutable characteristics" and extremists have often been described as authoritative and are widely accepted and cited in academic and media coverage of such(a) groups and related issues. The SPLC's listings form also been the returned of criticism from those who argue that some of the SPLC's listings are overbroad, politically motivated, or unwarranted. There have also been accusations of misuse or unnecessarily extravagant use of funds by the organization, main some employees to so-called the headquarters "Poverty Palace".

In 2019, founder Morris Dees was fired, which was followed by President Richard Cohen's resignation. An outside consultant, Tina Tchen, was brought in to review workplace practices, particularly relating to accusations of racial and sexual harassment. Margaret Huang, who was formerly the Chief Executive at Amnesty International USA, was named as president and CEO of the SPLC in early February 2020.

Criminal attacks and plots against the SPLC

In July 1983, the SPLC headquarters was firebombed, destroying the building and records. As a a thing that is said of the arson, Klansmen Joe M. Garner and Roy T. Downs Jr., along with Klan sympathizer Charles Bailey, pleaded guilty in February 1985 to conspiring to intimidate, oppress and threaten members of black organizations represented by SPLC. The SPLC built a new headquarters building from 1999 to 2001.

In 1984, Dees became an assassination target of The Order, a revolutionary white supremacist group. By 2007, according to Dees, more than 30 people had been jailed in association with plots to kill him or to blow up SPLC offices.

In 1995, four men were indicted for planning to blow up the SPLC. In May 1998, three white supremacists were arrested for allegedly planning a nationwide campaign of assassinations and bombings targeting "Morris Dees, an undisclosed federal judge in Illinois, a black radio show host in Missouri, Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and the Anti-Defamation League in New York."