Jewish SPLC President Resigns Amid Accusations of Racial Discrimination Against Black Employees

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Southern Poverty Law Center President resigns amid accusations of racial discrimination against black employees. The far left wing non-profit organization is also facing a slew of defamation lawsuits.

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen to step down

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said in a statement Friday he has asked the board of the troubled organization to "to immediately launch a search for an interim president in order to give the organization the best chance to heal," and took responsibility for problems that have swept out the senior leadership of the group in just a week.

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Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center, speaks as the Southern Poverty Law Center holds a press conference to update the status of their lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections, dealing with the medical and mental health needs of inmates, on the steps of the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday February 8, 2019. (Photo: Mickey Welsh / Advertiser)

More: Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees

Cohen, who has worked at the SPLC since 1986 and served as president since 2003, said in the statement that "we'll emerge stronger" after an audit of the organization's practices by Tina Tchen, a former White House official and Chicago-based lawyer.

"Given my long tenure as the SPLC president, however, I do not think I should be involved in that process beyond cooperating with Tina, her team, and the board in any way that may be helpful," the statement said. "Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them."

When reached for comment on Friday evening, an SPLC spokesperson said the center cannot comment on the specifics of individual personnel decisions.

Cohen's statement follow's last week termination of SPLC co-founder Morris Dees. Cohen last week said Dees failed to adhere to the organization's "values," hinting broadly at misconduct. The Los Angeles Times reported the resignation of an assistant legal director in recent weeks over race and gender equity concerns may have acted as a catalyst for Dees' removal.

On Thursday, Rhonda Brownstein, SPLC legal director and a member of its senior leadership staff, also resigned, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to the Advertiser.

The center has grown from a three-man legal organization to a mammoth, $450-million advocacy organization with offices across the Southeast.

Since Dees' termination, the Advertiser has reached out to more than a dozen current or former center employees. The majority either did not return comment or declined to speak, but four former employees agreed to outline their experiences to an Advertiser reporter.

All four employees requested anonymity due to the center's sterling reputation in the progressive nonprofit and political realms, where all continue to work.

Several of the employees described high staff turnover and a "toxic" workplace riddled with conflicting priorities and inter-office politics.

All four independently spoke of racial equity concerns in senior leadership, describing a disproportionate amount of people of color serving in entry-level administrative positions compared to the rest of the workforce. Two former employees said they were disconcerted by what they viewed as sluggish responses to high-profile cases of deadly police force in recent years, as well as prioritization of marketing and fundraising over on-the-ground civil rights work.

A review of the center's 2019 board and senior staff reveals that senior leadership at SPLC remains largely white.

Dees had weathered criticism for decades, with a 1994 Montgomery Advertiser series citing concerns about racial discrimination against back employees. Staffers at the time “accused Morris Dees, the center’s driving force, of being a racist and black employees have ‘felt threatened and banded together.’” Dees strenuously denied the accusation at the time.

Critics of the center in recent years have drawn attention to SPLC's behemoth fundraising mechanism.

"His obsession has really been with fundraising," said Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.

"And the fundraising really promotes him. It’s brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars. It’s enabled him in some ways to overcome whatever bad press he got. When you’re sending out mail to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them don’t live in Alabama. The bad press just didn’t compare to the fundraising appeals. Morris is a genius of fundraising solicitations. He’s the king of junk mail. He did it better than anybody else."

Bright, a longtime critic of Dees, said the SPLC continues to do good work but, "If you have $430 million, do you really need people to give you more money at that point?"

Dees personally raked in nearly $5.7 million in compensation since 2001 according to a review of publicly available tax documents.

Over the years, the SPLC has continued to amass massive funds from donors amid differing levels of scrutiny. The nonprofit has hundreds of employees and offices in four states.

Its $450-millon coffers easily dwarf other civil rights groups — such as the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP — during the same time frame. The Montgomery-based EJI had about $57 million in net assets at that time and the NAACP had about $3.8 million.

Cohen in the statement called it an "incredible honor" to serve. According to a biography on the SPLC website, Cohen joined the center as legal director in 1986 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. He was later promoted to vice president of SPLC programs before he was named as president in 2003.

"I hope everyone participates in the transformational process that Tina will be leading with an open heart and an open mind," the statement said. "And I hope that everyone will let the process play out before jumping to conclusions. We can’t be calling for a review and simultaneously casting blame before that review is complete."





Southern Poverty Law Center President Plans Exit Amid Turmoil
 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-fairly/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.115b1f30eeca


They got called out about this last year:

The State of Hate
Researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center have set themselves up as the ultimate judges of hate in America. But are they judging fairly?

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To illustrate this story, we asked four artists to create visual interpretations of the concept of hate. This illustration: Andrea Levy for The Washington Post.

Story by David Montgomery
NOVEMBER 8, 2018

See that speck there?” retired Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin says, directing my gaze to the ceiling of the Family Research Council’s lobby in Washington. I spy a belly-button-size opening in the plaster. “That’s a bullet hole.”

The blemish has been preserved for six years. “See that?” he asks, now indicating a cratered fire alarm panel near the reception desk. “That’s a bullet hole. That’s the first round. The second went through the arm of the building manager. The third round hit the ceiling. … Fired on August 15th, 2012, by Floyd Lee Corkins.”

The hero of that day was the building manager, Leo Johnson, who tackled Corkins and was shot in the arm as they scuffled. Asked by an FBI agent how he came to single out the FRC, Corkins replied: “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups.” The gunman, who was found to be mentally ill, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“He came in here to kill as many of us as possible because he found us listed as a hate group on the Southern Poverty Law Center website,” continues Boykin, FRC’s executive vice president, who is dressed today in a leather vest over a shirt and tie. “We and others like us who are on this ‘hate map’ believe that this is very reckless behavior. … The only thing that we have in common is that we are all conservative organizations. … You know, it would be okay if they just criticized us. … If they wrote op-eds about us and all that. But listing us as a hate group is just a step too far because they put us in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan. And who are they to have a hate-group list anyhow?”

Eight hundred miles south, the modernist, glass-and-concrete headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center etches the skyline of Montgomery, Ala., just up a hill from Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach. On display in the SPLC’s lobby is a melted clock. It marks the time at 3:47 a.m., July 28, 1983, when Klansmen torched a previous SPLC headquarters. Over the years, according to the organization, more than two dozen extremists have been jailed for plots to kill its employees or damage its offices.

Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC, decries Corkins’s assault on the FRC when I ask him about it in his office, with its view of King’s church. But he says the SPLC’s hate list — which doesn’t include the FRC’s address or any call for violence — shouldn’t be held responsible. “Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing,” says Cohen, who is dressed in a polo shirt, khakis and running shoes.

“Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,” Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom, really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.”

The SPLC was founded in 1971 to take on legal cases related to racial injustice, poverty and the death penalty. Then, in the early 1980s, it launched Klanwatch, a project to monitor Klan groups, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. Their hate seemed self-evident. But eventually the SPLC began tracking — and labeling — a wider swath of extremism. And that’s when things became more complicated.

Today the SPLC’s list of 953 “Active Hate Groups” is an elaborate taxonomy of ill will. There are many of the usual suspects: Ku Klux Klan (72 groups), Neo-Nazi (121), White Nationalist (100), Racist Skinhead (71), Christian Identity (20), Neo-Confederate (31), Black Nationalist (233) and Holocaust Denial (10). There are also more exotic strains familiar only to connoisseurs: Neo-Volkisch (28; “spirituality premised on the survival of white Europeans”) and Radical Traditional Catholicism (11; groups that allegedly “routinely pillory Jews as ‘the perpetual enemy of Christ’ ”). Then there are the more controversial additions of the last decade-and-a-half or so: Anti-LGBT (51), Anti-Muslim (113), Anti-Immigrant (22), Hate Music (15), Male Supremacy (2). Finally, the tally is rounded out by a general category called Other (53) — “a hodge-podge of hate doctrines.”

For decades, the hate list was a golden seal of disapproval, considered nonpartisan enough to be heeded by government agencies, police departments, corporations and journalists. But in recent years, as the list has swept up an increasing number of conservative activists — mostly in the anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim categories — those conservatives have been fighting back. Boykin, of the FRC, recently sent a letter to about 100 media outlets (including The Washington Post) and corporate donors on behalf of four dozen groups and individuals “who have been targeted, defamed, or otherwise harmed” by the SPLC, warning that the hate list is no longer to be trusted. Mathew Staver, chairman of the Christian legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel, told me 60 organizations are interested in suing the SPLC.

There are signs the campaign is having an impact. Last year GuideStar, a widely consulted directory of charitable organizations, flagged 46 charities that were listed by the SPLC as hate groups. Within months, under pressure from critics, GuideStar announced it was removing the flags. The FBI has worked with the SPLC in the past on outreach programs, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions has signaled a very different attitude. At a meeting of the Alliance Defending Freedom in August, Sessions said, “You are not a hate group,” and condemned the SPLC for using the label “to bully and to intimidate groups like yours which fight for religious freedom.”

Along the way, the SPLC undermined its own credibility with a couple of blunders. In 2015, it apologized for listing Ben Carson as an extremist (though not on the hate list), saying the characterization was inaccurate. Then, this past June, the group paid $3.4 million to Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam organization to settle a threatened lawsuit. The SPLC had listed them in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” (again, not on the main hate list). The SPLC apologized for misunderstanding Nawaz’s work to counter Islamist extremism.

Ironically, the assault on the SPLC comes at a time when, by other measures, it has reached a new peak of public regard. Last year the group raised a whopping $132 million through its famously relentless direct-mail appeals and other giving. (Disclosure: Last year my wife gave $25 to the SPLC, as I learned from her after I started working on this story.) That’s a 164 percent increase over the $50 million it took in a year before. The SPLC’s endowment is up to $433 million. SPLC leaders explain the jump as a reaction to the tone unleashed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and continued by the Trump administration.

What should we make of the SPLC at a moment when its influence is growing — and its detractors are louder than ever? I recently spent time shuttling between the SPLC and the people it is seeking to monitor. By getting specific about the SPLC’s particular charges against particular organizations, I thought I might be able to try to separate hate from hyperbole.

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(Tim McDonagh for The Washington Post)
The SPLC’s definition of a hate group is “an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics,” including race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. It’s a standard that is in line with the latest thinking among scholars of hate, and also one that intentionally parallels the FBI’s definition of a hate crime.

Does an alliance of lawyers with conservative Christian leanings that has won nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in the past seven years meet that criteria? According to Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project — which produces the hate list — the decision to put the Alliance Defending Freedom on the list for 2016 was a judgment call that went all the way up to top leadership at the SPLC.

The ADF’s Supreme Court victories have included the case of the Colorado baker who didn’t want to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and the effort to block California from forcing antiabortion pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion providers. But those didn’t get the ADF placed on the hate list. Instead, a major strike against the group was its decision to file an amicus brief in the 2003 landmark Supreme Court case that struck down a Texas law criminalizing gay sex. The ADF wanted to uphold the state’s right to decide whether “it is reasonable to believe that same-sex sodomy is a distinct public health problem,” according to the ADF’s brief. “It clearly is.”

“It’s really bad that you want these people thrown in jail for consensual activity,” Beirich told me. “It’s literally barbaric in our opinion. And that was the thing that really pushed ADF over the top to us.” Beirich counts not just the Texas case, but also more recent assistance the ADF has given in cases that would have preserved criminal sanctions for sodomy in other countries.

When I met ADF senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill, the alleged card-carrying hate-group member was wearing, yes, a mainstream business suit and tie. He said the criminalization cases cited by the SPLC amounted to less than 1 percent of the ADF’s work and raised issues of courts usurping the will of the people, a larger subject that animates the ADF. He also defended his group’s submission of a brief in a case involving birth certificates in France that, according to the SPLC, would have resulted in the forced sterilization of transgender people. Tedesco countered that the ADF is against the forced sterilization of anyone and that the case really was about the autonomy of nations in Europe and protecting traditional gender distinctions in the law — another principle that motivates the alliance. He added that France itself denied that forced sterilization was at stake. (Beirich told me later that the SPLC stands by its characterization of the case.)

Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,” says Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial.
 
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