Contrary to the organization’s cultivated image as a “civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,” Harper’s magazine notes that SPLC’s “entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’ refusal to address issues—such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action—that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities [because they are] far less marketable to affluent benefactors.” Harper’s also reported that another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, stated that SPLC’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Commentator Don Feder, in an article that appeared in Front Page magazine, wrote:
What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there’s a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this “the broad-brush smear.”
The SPLC has earned critics from the left, right, and center. Cornell University Professor William A. Jacobson has observed: “I regularly donated to the SPLC. I stopped those donations long ago, as the SPLC drifted from its original mission into left-wing politics.”5 Across the political spectrum there are sources who have investigated and refuted SPLC’s claims: The Humanist magazine asserts
The SPLC campaigns for laws that will effectively deny free speech and freedom of association to certain groups of Americans on the basis of their beliefs. Six times a year, the SPLC’s letter boasts, the center reports its findings to over 6,000 law-enforcement agencies; then, with no discernible irony, it goes on to justify its Big Brother methods in the name of tolerance.
