On Monday evening, Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder and civil rights activist Morris Dees spoke to a capacity crowd at the Elam Center about the importance of tolerance and diversity.

In his speech, “Voices of Hope and Tolerance,” Dees outlined his history as a high-profile Southern attorney.

The program, sponsored by the Honors Department, the Fresh-man Experience, the Student Activities Coun-cil and the Student Government Association, was the first in UTM’s Academic Speaker Series.

Dees, 68, is currently the chief trial counselor of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. For 30 years, Dees has tracked and fought domestic terrorists and hate groups in court.

Among Dees’ legal successes is a $7 million judgment against the Ku Klux Klan for inciting violence against African-Americans and other minority groups. In 1990, Dees won a $12.5 million judgment on behalf of the family of an Ethiopian murdered by Oregon Skinheads.

In 1998 Dees also helped litigate a case against the KKK for the burning of the Macedonia Baptist Church in South Carolina. The award was the largest civil judgment in U.S. history, $37.8 million. Many legal scholars attribute Dees’ legal successes to leading to the bankruptcy of the KKK.

Dees credits his parents with helping to form his social conscience as a child growing up in Alabama.

“I think that growing up with progressive parents who taught us to be fair, having the ability to get a law degree and seeing injustice committed against people was mainly what allowed me to do this,” Dees said.

“Until I was probably 15 or 16, things were going on in the South as they had been going on for 100 years after the Civil War,” he said. “Then I started thinking about civil rights, mostly with black kids that I knew, and the injustices that they experienced.”

Dees got his start in fighting for social justice in college at the University of Alabama, where he founded a nationwide direct-mail book sales company.

“I didn’t do anything but speak out against local injustice. Then I got to thinking about civil rights,” Dees said.

After law school Dees took on a pro bono case in his home state for the desegregation of the Montgomery YMCA.

“I represented a couple of little black kids who wanted to go to YMCA summer camp. I filed a lawsuit for the kids and showed that the city conspired with the YMCA to keep black kids out,” Dees said.

He continued to take on private civil cases and do “side work” in civil rights, and Dees took profits from his private work to prosecute civil rights cases. Those funds eventually became the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“At the time I founded (the SPLC) I was doing a number of cases and didn’t have the money to fund them. I had some experience in raising money by mail through the mail-order book business and borrowed ideas from other organizations like the ACLU and Common Cause,” Dees said.

One of the first cases that gained Dees notoriety was filed for an African-American who wanted to become a state trooper. “At the time, there were no black state troopers in Alabama,” Dees explained. “He was the first one.”

Dees also helped organize marches to protest the 1963 Sixteenth Street Church bombings in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four African-American girls.

He was also influential in taking people to Selmer for the voting rights march to Montgomery.

“It was a time when state troopers would take your car tags away for something like that,” Dees said.

Dees also helped to establish the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery in memory of people who lost their lives from 1954 to 1968. The memorial was designed by Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

In recent years, Dees has initiated several educational programs, including his “Teaching Tolerance” campaign and his Web site tolerance.com.

In addition to his legal accomplishments, Dees was the finance director for George McGovern’s campaign for the presidency in 1972.

Currently, Dees keeps an active list of operating domestic terrorist and hate groups. He tracks their activities and finances, and routinely takes up suits against them. The SPLC’s Intelligence Report monitors hate group activity in the United States.

“All Americans, especially college-age students, need to realize that America is drastically changing, and it’s not the world we grew up in. In a few years (European-Americans) will be a minority in this country. There’s going to be a lot of conflicts about whose America this is, and we’re going to be fighting that fight mostly in political campaigns. The debate is where to allocate resources,” Dees explained. “Does the money go to Baghdad to build a sewer system or to the poor to help fight poverty?”

Dees stressed the importance of knowledge in a healthy democracy. He said that those who are informed are the ones who will make influential decisions.

“Be aware of the history that’s going on in front of you and keep it in perspective. Part of education is really understanding how it all relates to you,” he said.

Dees was named “Trial Lawyer of the Year” by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and received the National Education Association’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award. The ACLU named Dees the recipient of the Roger Baldwin Awards, and the American Bar Association awarded him the Young Lawyers Distinguished Service Award.

Dees published A Season for Justice in 1991 and Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi in 1993. Among his works is also Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat, which describes the rise of domestic terrorism. Thomas Rakes, vice chancellor of Academic Affairs, was pleased for the high-profile attorney to appear on campus. “The university is a place to discuss a mixture of both ideals and ideas. Mr. Dees brings to us a perspective that offers this opportunity front and center. That is what a campus is for; we’re supposed to challenge those ideas.” John Chambers, a freshman Secondary Education major from Westmoreland, said, “(Dees) is a really good guy, a fair guy. He’s done a lot for society and has done a lot to help the South.” “I think it’s good that he came because Martin has a very diverse population of students and it is very educational for those who attend. I enjoyed his speech and thought he made excellent points,” said Adam Strauser, a freshman undecided major from Milan.

Sarah Roberts, a freshman Music major from Martin, said, “I’ve heard he has a lot of threats against his life, but it’s really awesome that he doesn’t have any fears and does what he believes in.”