Rusty [Harris, editor of the 30,000 circulation Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County in the early 1990s] patiently explained that we’d already given this quite a bit of thought, and we stood by our position.
Then things turned ugly. It would be unfortunate, the SPLC rep told Rusty, if the SPLC had to add a newspaper of all things to their hate watch list! That they would name our editorial board members as well, let the world know that we supported hate!
Rusty had grown up with severe deafness as a child (and later came out as gay) in Kansas in the 1950s and ’60s, and he was not a man to be bullied. Nor did I ever see him intimidated.
He paused for half a minute or so, then quietly told the SPLC rep, “Well, why don’t you do that, then? That should be quite interesting.”
We never heard from them again, and so far as I know, neither Rusty nor I was added to the hate watch list.
But it sure left a sour taste in my mouth.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Jim Treacher, who writes, “And that was in the early ‘90s. So they’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. They amassed all that money and all that power, and they used it to threaten their political opponents. They might have even committed bank fraud to do it. Allegedly.)
UPDATE: “The Feds need to investigate the Southern Poverty Law Center’s finances,” Jim Tharpe, former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser wrote in the WaPo in 2019:
More than two decades ago, I was managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, which was located one block from the SPLC in downtown Montgomery, Ala. I proposed an investigation into the organization after ongoing complaints from former SPLC staffers, who came and went with regularity but always seemed to tell the same story. Only the names and faces changed. The SPLC, they said, was not what it appeared to be. Many urged the newspaper to take a look.
We were, at the time, anything but adversaries with the center. Like other media outlets, we generally parroted SPLC press releases. We also became friends with SPLC staffers, occasionally attending the center’s parties. Some of my reporters dated staffers at the center.
That relationship, however, suddenly soured when reporters Dan Morse and Greg Jaffe (both of whom now work for The Post) began making serious inquiries about the SPLC’s finances and the treatment of black employees.
SPLC leaders threatened legal action on several occasions, and at one point openly attacked the newspaper’s investigation in a mass mailing to Montgomery lawyers and judges. Then they slammed the door.
“Accommodating your charade of objectivity simply takes too much of our time,” center co-founder Joseph J. Levin Jr. wrote the Advertiser in 1993. “Our patience in this matter is exhausted, and we will not respond to further inquiries of any sort.”
In February 1994, after three years of research, the Advertiser published an eight-part series titled “Rising Fortunes: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center” that found a litany of problems and questionable practices at the SPLC, including a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who “likened the center to a plantation”; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money not on programs but on raising more money; and paying its top staffers (including Dees and Cohen) lavish salaries.
Racial slurs? A plantation-like atmosphere? Those claims certainly hit different after Tuesday night: Corrupt Business Model: SPLC Funded the White Supremacists It Claimed to Despise.
