• Founder and chief trial lawyer of the Southern Poverty Law Center
• Exaggerates the prevalence and capabilities of rightwing racist and extremist groups operating in the United States

Morris Seligman Dees is the founder and chief trial lawyer of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Dees was born into a Shorter, Alabama farming family in 1936. As an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, he founded a direct mail order sales company, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, which prospered into one of the largest publishing firms in the South. In 1960 he graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law and continued to run his business until the late Sixties, when "a night of soul searching at a snowed-in Cincinnati airport" led him to sell his company to the Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. Dees professed an eagerness to "speak out for [his] black friends who were still 'disenfranchised' even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965." "I had made up my mind," he would write  in his 1991 autobiography A Season for Justice, "I would sell the company as soon as possible and specialize in civil rights law."

In 1971 Dees used the funds from the Times Mirror sale to establish the Montgomery-based SPLC with Julian Bond and attorney Joseph Levin.

In 1972 Dees served as the chief fundraiser for George McGovern's presidential campaign, for which he raised some $20 million.

In 1975 Dees was arrested and removed from court for attempting to suborn perjury (by means of a bribe) on behalf of the defendant in a North Carolina murder trial. Though the felony charge against Dees was subsequently dropped, the presiding judge refused to re-admit him to the case; that refusal was upheld on appeal.

Dees has represented SPLC in a number of high-profile legal victories against hate and extremist groups, propelling the organization into the national spotlight. These included lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, and the White Aryan Resistance.

Dees is known to be the architect of one of SPLC's most effective—and most controversial—tactics: exaggerating the prevalence and capabilities of racist and extremist rightwing groups operating in the United States in order to frighten supporters into donating money to SPLC.

Many critics charge that this fundraising revenue, instead of bankrolling SPLC's civil rights work, is funneled disproportionately into the coffers of SPLC officers like Dees. Several studies conducted in the 1990s indicated that the Dees and other top SPLC figures earned significantly higher salaries than the leaders of most non-profit organizations.

Because SPLC perennially disburses twice as much on fundraising as it does on legal services (while skimming off substantial amounts of revenue for its own endowment), Dees' income has provoked accusations of fraud. Stephen Bright, a director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a leftwing Atlanta-based group that opposes the death penalty, put it bluntly in a 1996 letter to Dees, in which he denounced the latter as a "a fraud and a conman," and upbraided Dees because "you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself shamelessly."

Similarly, leftwing journalist Alexander Cockburn accused Dees of raising funds "by frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street."

The accusations against Dees have also come from some of the people closest to him. As Dees' onetime business partner Millard Fuller once said: "Morris and I ... shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich."

In 1986, SPLC's entire legal staff quit in an act of defiance against Dees for his pursuit of lucrative, high-profile cases against the KKK, in preference to working to secure civil liberties for the poor. Speaking to reporters, SPLC attorney Gloria Browne candidly admitted that the Center's programs were devised to cash in on "black pain and white guilt."

Asked about his knack for generating revenue, Dees once boasted,  "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church. Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation -- why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling."

As of 2000, SPLC's assets exceeded $120 million; that same year, the organization spent twice as much on fundraising efforts as on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. Accordingly, the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group, gave SPLC one of the worst ratings of all of the organizations it monitored.

"They're drowning in their own affluence," former SPLC legal fellow Pamela Summers told The Montgomery Advertiser. "What they are doing in the legal department is not done for the best interest of everybody [but] is done as though the sole, overriding goal is to make money." "I think people associate the SPLC with going to court," added Summers. "And that's why they get the money. And they don't go to court."

In 1976, Dees, hopeful of being named U.S. Attorney General, served as a national finance director for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. But he rapidly lost enthusiasm for what he perceived as the campaign's ideological and tactical moderation. "You've got to have a candidate who is way out on the extremes!" said Dees.

Dees also acted as a fundraiser for both Ted Kennedy's 1980 and Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaigns, and he received their mailing lists as part of his compensation.

After SPLC won a highly publicized settlement against the Ku Klax Klan—a case that earned Dees $350,000—Dees' life became the plot of a doting TV movie, 1991's Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story, with Dees played by the actor Corbin Bernson.

In 1996 Dees wrote, along with reporter James Corcoran, Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat.

At an April 1996 news conference in Washington, Dees announced that there had been a recent spate of black church burnings in the South which "certainly" had been carried out "by racists." Over time, his repeated allegations about a racially motivated arson epidemic helped fuel widespread public concern. Outraged civil rights activists nationwide demanded an investigation. It was ultimately learned, however, that Dees' claim was unfounded.

Dees was again in the spotlight in the fall of 2000, when he narrated an HBO documentary, titled Hate.com, about extremism in America. But critics noted that while Dees and SPLC regularly condemned rightwing extremist and nationalist groups, they consistently failed to apply similar scrutiny to leftwing hate groups.