Fie on the Southern Poverty Law Center: Betrayal of trust and a long relationship
Confession: I am a conservative who has been a devotee of the Southern Poverty Law Center since the 1970s. I have made donations to them almost every year since 1990, according to a call I made to their super-friendly representative yesterday-averaging about $75 a year and peaking at $300 in 2018.
As a conservative, when dealing with possibly liberal organizations, I have spent some time ensuring that they followed my values: transparency, honesty, fairness, responsibility and overall integrity.
In the area of race relations, I have given often to three institutions which exemplified these values: the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and the Jackie Robinson Foundation (JRF).
But there is no recipient to whom I have donated more often than the SPLC.
Why?
My first undergraduate years (1964-1966) were spent at Vanderbilt University wherein I first witnessed significant anti-Semitism and its related ugliness, racial prejudice–not in that order.
Vandy, as we all called it, had just begun to allow African-Americans to matriculate. And one of my two closest friends during my two years there was Norman Bonner, a brilliant Black student and as decent and likeable a young man as you could ever know.
Contrary to general perceptions of discrimination looking at that period, the truly ugly prejudice was committed by hard conservatives, who persecuted Jewish and Black citizens. At Vandy these were Southern boys who had their own floor on the dorm, Vanderbilt Hall.
My roommate, a starting quarterback for what passed as Vanderbilt’s football team, when I screwed up a test, said to me tauntingly: “I thought Jews were supposed to be so smart.”
Norm had water poured under his door, endangering his life, as the dorm rooms had floor lamps. He left Vandy without rancor, saying the acts of vandalism and bad treatment of people who looked like him were not what he expected from Vanderbilt University.
I saw consistent hatred toward Blacks and Jewish people, decried but never acted on by Vanderbilt except to begin to accept a small number of such applicants.
Back to the SPLC.
Based in Alabama-where I had been treated to a visit (with some friends when I was at Vandy) with hostile behavior by inhabitants of The National States Party House-the SPLC had for over a half-century been a source of great activity, including fights against awful discrimination in civil rights causes, educational outrages in segregation and discrimination.
The SPLC was the port in a racial and religious storm.
Their enemies, exemplified by The Ku Klux Klan and others, were always the SPLC’s legal and rhetorical targets.
Every moderate conservative I knew respected the SPLC from the 1970s on.
No more.
The unthinkable has happened: According to the Department of Justice, “Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America….”
“‘The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. ‘Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.’ “
Days ago, hearings by the House Judiciary Committee examined the alleged hypocrisies of the SPLC, watching the ironically named SPLC’s CEO Bryan Fair squirm and avoid questions which made their sneaky head inadvertently make the case against his once-revered organization.
Good-bye Southern Poverty Law Center-we hardly knew ye. Back, back to organizations with integrity, such as the United Negro College Fund and the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
Richard E. Vatz https://wp.towson.edu/vatz/ is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political rhetoric at Towson University and author of The Only Authentic of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model (Bookwrights House, 2024) and over 200 other works, essays, lectures, and op-eds. He is the benefactor of the Richard E. Vatz Best Debater Award at Towson. The Van Bokkelen Auditorium at Towson University has been named after him.