Blogging across my curriculum as a returning student. :)

Most of you have never heard of Morris Dees, but he is one of the reasons that you live in a free country because there are those who try every day to change that. Morris Dees began his own successful publishing company while at the University of Alabama, and got his law degree in 1960 before rising above his environment of southern white racism to become recognized as a true American hero.

In his autobiography he wrote about having found a singular peacefulness in his decision to specialize in civil rights law. He began his lifelong mission with a lawsuit to stop construction of an all-white university, filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA, and later successfully fought to integrate the Alabama State Troopers.

He has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award, had a TV movie glorify his work in Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story, and had his work featured in National Geographic’s “Inside American Terror” in 2008. He has been described as “his generation’s most valiant and effective soldier in the fight for civil rights and civil liberties.” The Morris Dees Justice Award for lawyers is named in his honor for his lifelong dedication to public service.

Using the money from the sale of his business he established The Southern Poverty Law Center, better known as SPLC. Dees’ track record through SPLC spans decades in the ongoing civil rights movement, the war on domestic terror, and in advocacy for the rights and protection of children and the disabled. Way ahead of national awareness in the front against domestic terror, Dees’ lawsuits closed paramilitary training sites in Texas, Alabama and North Carolina, where Klansmen were taught hand to hand combat, the use of weapons including grenades and other explosives, using in one location military personnel, and stolen government weapons to train recruits in the early and mid-1980s . The Klan said that the training was necessary for the coming “race war”.

Dees and SPLC have won multi-million dollar lawsuits against several Neo Nazi groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, The United Klans of America, The Invisible Empire Klan, and the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, bankrupting many of them. Morris Dees and his SPLC are still defending American liberty. SPLC has a full docket of cases defending the rights of all Americans, including the physically and mentally disabled, special education students and juveniles abused in detention centers, all while tracking hate activity, providing tools and training for better race-relation education, and advocating for better access to mental health services across the south.

At 74 years old, Morris Dees life has prepared him for the present, when domestic terror, fear-mongering and hate speech have gone mainstream. He has in turn prepared a way for us to go mainstream in defending our country, and in ensuring the liberty of all Americans for generations to come. The future of the civil rights movement, and the fight against homegrown terrorism will shape tomorrow’s America for the children of today. Because the best kept secrets in this country are that we have been at war on our own soil for decades, and that the civil rights movement needs to stay just as alive and active as those who would deprive even one American of their civil rights.

We have the rare gift and opportunity to stand strong against hate alongside a great, living American hero, Morris Dees, in ensuring that America’s future is one of freedom, justice and liberty. I hope that you will join Morris Dees, and Americans across the country at Southern Poverty Law Center online at http://www.splcenter.org. or at the Southern Poverty Law Center page on Facebook.