XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities, alt.politics.democrats.d, sac.general   
   XPost: alt.rush-limbaugh   
   From: jane.fonda.socialist.report@cnn.com   
      
   In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-   
   founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve   
   been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used   
   to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the   
   center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs,   
   we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King,   
   Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like   
   waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls   
   down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning   
   idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the   
   S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited   
   listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases   
   against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of   
   direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The   
   mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy   
   band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working   
   under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in   
   the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a   
   writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours   
   working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of   
   super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work   
   before I’d even begun it.   
      
   The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown   
   Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s   
   Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,   
   where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently   
   built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the   
   social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a   
   “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.”   
   It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an   
   underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic   
   security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which   
   made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure   
   at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial   
   dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was   
   then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost   
   all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,”   
   one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional   
   staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations   
   officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just   
   two staffers, including me, were openly gay.   
      
   During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t   
   help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the   
   Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will   
   never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you   
   live.”   
      
   “Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the   
   lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on   
   here?”   
      
   “And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again.   
   “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”   
      
   In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation   
   as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d   
   peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had   
   been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among   
   other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination   
   within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had   
   revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a   
   hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries   
   to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most   
   nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great   
   Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive,   
   had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime   
   mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who   
   viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking   
   gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a   
   business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or   
   causes, it’s all the same.”   
      
   Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a   
   rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about   
   what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming   
   female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues   
   about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the   
   unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top   
   of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)