Morris Dees, the renowned civil rights attorney and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, will speak in a free public lecture titled Voices of Hope and Tolerance for the New Millennium as part of the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies on Sunday, November 5 at 3 p.m. in UCSB Campbell Hall. As chief trial counsel and chair of the executive committee of the Center, Dees devotes much of his time to suing violent white supremacist groups and developing ideas for Teaching Tolerance, the Center’s education project. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of books by Morris Dees will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Dees is co-chair with Rosa Parks of the Center’s National Campaign for Tolerance, a plan to enlist 5 million people to participate in tolerance initiatives in their local communities. The Campaign has no fixed time limit, but Center officials hope it will peak on December 1, 2005, 50 years after Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and sparked the Civil Rights Movement.

Dees is most widely known for landmark civil rights litigation in which he won historic judgments against hate groups, that resulted in the bankruptcy of major organizations and their leaders, effectively putting them out of business by eliminating their ability to influence others. In September of this year, Dees won $11.26 million in punitive damages against Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations for hate crimes committed outside their compound in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. Among his most famous suits is the $12.5 million judgment in 1990 against Tom Metzger. Head of the California group the White Aryan Resistance, Metzger was linked to the clubbing death of an Ethiopian refugee by two white skinheads in Oregon. It was determined that literature he wrote and disseminated incited the killers to violence.

In 1996, Dees effectively tried Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers, after a 30-year series of mistrials had virtually let him off the hook for the 1966 bombing murder of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP leader in Mississippi. In 1998, Bowers was finally sentenced to life in prison for Dahmer’s death. That same year, Dees sued for damages a corporate Klan group called the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, many of whose members had already received federal sentences for burning a black church in South Carolina. He won a record $37.8 million in restitution for the church and is quoted in Life magazine as saying, “when we’re through with them, they’ll be out of business.”

In an interview in Trial magazine, Dees described his approach to suing racist organizers, particularly the ones in the church-burning case, “We’re claiming that the Klan organization is responsible because these members were carrying out the Klan’s racist goals. It’s the same theory we’ve always used... to hold the Klan organization liable, as well as the individual members who were involved.”

Dees graduated from the University of Alabama Law School in 1960 and began both his law practice and a mail-order publishing business, which grew to be one of the largest publishing companies in the South. He sold the company to Times Mirror in 1969. After having been active during the Civil Rights Movement aiding minorities in court in the late 1960s, he joined with Joseph J. Levin, Jr. and Julian Bond to form the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971.

In addition to conducting civil rights lawsuits at no charge to its clients, the Center operates Klanwatch, a state-of-the-art information team that monitors hate groups and develops legal strategies for protecting citizens from violence-prone groups. To help educate young people about the civil rights movement, Dees developed the idea for the Civil Rights Memorial. Designed by Maya Lin, the Memorial bears the names of forty men, women and children who lost their lives during the civil rights movement.

Dees’ autobiography, A Season for Justice, was published in 1991. His second book, Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, chronicling the Metzger trial, came out in 1993. His latest book, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat from 1996, exposes the danger posed by today’s domestic terrorist groups. He was portrayed in the feature film Mississippi Burning.

The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies are co-sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Hillel, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. This event is being presented with additional support from UCSB Affirmative Action Office, UCSB Bookstore, Center for Black Studies, Division of Student Affairs, Education Program for Culture Awareness, Educational Opportunity Program, History Department, UCSB MultiCultural Center, American Civil Liberties Union (Santa Barbara Chapter), Anti-Defamation League and Supervisor Susan Rose and Allan Ghitterman.

For more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2080.