Founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center speaks about the importance of diversity to counteract Hate Groups
Last night hundreds of people gathered at Fountain St. Church in downtown Grand Rapids for the last final lecture of the GRCC Diversity Learning Center. Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), spoke for about 40 minutes on the importance of diversity and tolerance, mixing in stories about Dr. King, biblical themes and some of his own personal experiences.
One story he told that reflected the importance of the work that the SPLC does was from the late 1970s. After the Vietnam War, thousands of refugees came to the US from Vietnam. About 50,000 of them settled in the Houston, Texas area. They did quite well financially and some of them decided to go into the shrimp business. They did well and began doing better than other commercial fisherman, who happened to be White. The White business people decided to lobby the State legislation to forbid granting a fishing license to the Vietnamese in response to their success. The legislature denied them, so they turned to the KKK for support.
The clan began to patrol in boats as a way to frighten the Vietnamese. The SPLC got involved in this case. They wanted to argue that what was happening was a violation of the federal trade and commerce laws, which the Vietnamese agreed to.
One of the most important aspects of the trial was the testimony from some in the Vietnamese community who claimed that the KKK threatened them if they continued to fish. The judge eventually decided in their favor based in large part on that testimony.
At an event to celebrate the victory they had a blessing of the boats and as the ceremony was beginning federal marshals showed up to enforce their rights and Dees said it was a very proud moment, to have been a lawyer and an American.
Dees said that right now there are about 950 certified hate groups operating in the US. More alarming are the rise of militia groups in the US in recent years. The speaker made mention of the 9 individuals arrested just the other day in Michigan for hate crimes being planned with the use of weapons. In the last 12 months alone there have been an almost 500% increase in militia groups. There has also been about a 50% increase in nativist groups, mostly targeting Latinos and immigrants.
Add to this the Tea Party Movement, which Dees doesn’t qualify as a hate group, but acknowledges their “hate-filled rhetoric.” There is also the growing number of people who listen to hate speech manifested by the radio commentators like Glen Beck, Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, a trend which is well documented in Rory O’Connor’s book Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio.
The speech by Dees was originally scheduled for December, but was cancelled due to weather. An online forum for hate groups and White Supremacists was advocating a march against Dees visit back in December. Comments on that website refer to Dees as anti-White and a sexual pervert. One commentator even advocated going to the event and disrupting it. In fact, just before Dees got to the podium to speak someone did begin to yell, but was quickly escorted out of the building by police and body guards, which Dees always travels with because of the constant threats he receives from hate groups all across the country.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
correction-he is wearing a red button up shirt not a sweatshirt.
I appreciate that you mentioned that white supremacists had originally discussed the possibility of organizing something in response to Dees’ visit, however there are some problems with how you did it:
1. Stormfront is a message board, not a “hate group.” While it is a good source of information on what various racist groups are doing, it is not a group in and of itself.
2. Linking to Stormfront (as you did in this article) is irresponsible as each link to the website increases its prominence in search engines such as Google.
3. Finally, it was hard to know if there ever was an actual plan to stage a march at the event back in December. Stormfront tends to be a hotbed of talk with little action and it is easy to inflate the importance of the posts. Similarly, it is worth noting that in discussion of the April 1 Dees speech, some of the same commenters discussed it–yet no march was forthcoming. It’s good to watch these folks, but it is also important not to elevate them to something that they are not.
On a related note, the commenter above (Tom Metzger) is a former Ku Klux Klan leader and racist. His comment links to a white supremacist website.
Thank you for removing the link to the white supremacist message board Stormfront.
However, Tom Metzger’s comment still links to another white supremacist website, Resist.com. Just as a link to Stormfront increases that website’s visibility in search engines, so too does the link to Resist.com. I would either remove the link or remove the comment (it doesn’t add anything substantive to the discussion and nobody from this site has responded to Metzger’s allegations).
I also still think too much prominence is given to the discussion on Stormfront about organizing something around the event.