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Students and faculty stood in the cold outside Memorial Hall Jan. 16, waiting their turn to empty their pockets of keys and coins and any other objects that the metal detector set up in the doorway could mistake for a gun.
They came to see Morris Dees, the famous Alabama barrister for justice and fighter against hate who now finds himself the target of hate himself.
There have been so many death threats against him over the years that extraordinary precautions have become an ordinary part of his routine.
When he strode out onto the stage, nearly an hour after his speech was
scheduled, he was greeted with a standing ovation before he could open his
mouth.
He stood in front of the podium rather than behind it, he told the audience, so
he could "feel the emotions and look into your faces."
Dees was born the son of an Alabama farmer and cotton gin operator in 1936. He
was born into the middle of the Depression, in the heart of the Deep South
where old ways die hard. And racism had always been the way of life there, he
said.
In 1971, he and fellow lawyer Joe Levin established the Southern Poverty Law
Center in Mobile, Ala., a city that through the 1960s had established itself as
the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.
The center grew from a small civil rights law firm into an internationally
recognized organization known for its tolerance education program, for its
tracking of hate groups and for its legal victories against white supremacist
groups.
Celebrating King
Dees was invited here to help celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther
King Jr. -- and he did so by issuing a challenge to his audience to continue
working toward the America that King once dreamed was possible. That work, he
said, is far from done.
"I didn't come here tonight to put this great nation down to honor Dr. King,
but that being said, I do feel and I do believe that in spite of all the good
things about our nation, and the advances we've made, there is an ill wind that
is blowing across our nation."
That wind blew over Jasper, Texas, in June 1998 when two members of the Ku Klux
Klan stopped their pickup truck for a black man named James Byrd Jr. They beat
him, chained him by his ankles and dragged him three miles behind the pickup
truck until he was dead.
In August of 1999, that wind blew over Los Angeles as 37-year-old Buford O'Neal
Furrow Jr. sprayed bullets inside a Jewish community center, wounding five. A
member of the white supremacist group, The Order, Furrow told investigators he
wanted to "give a wakeup call to America to kill Jews."
Three months later, that same ill wind blew across a Wyoming desert where two
men drove Matthew Wayne Shepard, a 21-year-old college student, from a campus
bar. They tied him to a split-rail fence where he was tortured and
pistol-whipped as he begged for his life.
A cyclist found Shepard some 18 hours later, still tied to the fencepost, and
barely clinging to life. The cyclist mistook him for a scarecrow until he got
close enough to see Shepard's face, caked with blood and streaked with tears.
He died hours later in a hospital bed with his family at his side.
They killed him, Dees said, simply because he was gay.
The continuing battle
When King fought to get America to live up to the promise of equality
written into its Constitution, he had to face contemporaries with no foresight,
politicians with no backbone and terrorists with no conscience, Dees said.
Some 32 years after his death, the question he asked so many times still
lingers: Why can't we all get along with each other?
The answer, Dees suggested, is that the other enemies that King fought against
are still very much alive. They are hatred, intolerance, ignorance and fear.
In 2000, the FBI reported that 1,000 hate crimes were being committed across
the country every month. In 1995, there was a single hate site on the World
Wide Web. At last count, Dees said, there were 450.
And the battle that King gave his life for is still being fought. It's a battle
over whose America it is, and whose version of America will ultimately
prevail.
"It is a battle that didn't just start yesterday, but it's one in which each of
you in this auditorium is going to take part," Dees said. "You are going to
take part either by doing nothing and letting others set the agenda as you go
about your life, or you are going to become involved to make this nation the
great nation that it can be and fulfill the aspirations of Rosa Parks and Dr.
King and the other great heroes of the American Civil Rights Movement."
The weapon of words
A watershed victory in Dees' career came in 1990 when he won a record
judgment in the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, a young Ethiopian man who had come to
Portland, Ore., to work, go to college and pursue the American Dream.
He arrived in this country about the time a California TV repairman named Tom
Metzger was recruiting skinheads all over the country to form chapters of the
White Aryan Resistance organization, a group Metzger led.
Metzger taught his followers that America was a great nation because of the
contributions of white people and was being brought down from within by
so-called "mud people."
That included anybody who wasn't a white Aryan.
He sent one of his organizers, whom Dees referred to only as "Dave," up to
Portland to meet with a group of skinheads and preach Metzger's gospel. Dave
told the skinheads to get into the streets and create acts of violence and
speed up the race war that was sure to come in Portland. With these marching
orders from Metzger, three of the skinheads spotted a black man getting out of
a car and walking toward an apartment.
It was Seraw, getting home from his job at Avis Rental Car.
"Peace, peace -- please -- no trouble -- no trouble," Seraw pleaded as the
three skinheads taunted him and as one of them walked behind him and drew to
his fists a baseball bat he had tucked behind his leg.
The skinhead leveled a full swing at the blind side of Seraw's skull. He died
that night.
Lawyers representing the family members in Ethiopia called the Southern Poverty
Law Center to ask about bringing a lawsuit in a civil case to get financial
help for the wife and little boy left without any support.
While building the case, Dees encountered a Portland policeman who pulled out a
letter he thought might help.
It was a hand-written letter to the skinheads in Portland, and a passage said:
"When you meet Dave, our organizer, we will teach you how we operate." It was
signed, "Tom Metzger, for a White America."
And it was the weapon that Dees would use to bludgeon Metzger in court.
Dees recalled the last moments of that trial, as Metzger stood up instead of
his lawyers to defend himself in his own closing argument.
Look, Metzger told the jury, I didn't know the victim. I didn't know the
skinheads. I was 1,200 miles away. And I have a right to free speech, even if
what I say is unpopular.
After he sat down, Dees stood for a while thinking of what he might say to the
jury to counter that argument. And he looked at the three men sitting behind
Metzger, the three men who had bumped into Seraw on a Portland street.
"I said, `Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to look at the three people sitting
behind Mr. Metzger's counsel table. Those are his children. And you know, not
one of them has to worry about getting polio because of the brilliance of a
Jewish doctor, Jonas Salk. And if we lived in Tom Metzger's America, we
wouldn't have the brilliance of African-American general Colin Powell.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the America that Tom Metzger believes in never existed.
Our nation is great because of the contributions of all of us."
The jury agreed and awarded Seraw's estate $12.5 million, the largest civil
judgment in Oregon history.
He told the story to his audience without the hot rhetoric or soaring oratory
of other civil rights leaders. He spoke instead with the rehearsed polish of
the lawyer he is, confident the facts of his case were powerful enough to stand
up without being shouted.
And as quietly as he spoke of Metzger, Dees recalled an uncle of his who ran a
crossroads grocery store where he kept a Ku Klux Klan robe in his closet and
sometimes pulled it on occasionally just to scare people.
Dees said he loved his uncle, then and now, and was grateful he changed his
views on race before he died.
Sometimes, the victories come overnight in a courtroom.
Sometimes, they come over many years, in people's hearts.
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