SACRAMENTO BEE

January 6, 2007

Taking injustice personally

Rather than touting his past civil rights successes, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center is finding new causes to back

By Alison Roberts - Bee Staff Writer

Morris Dees' words flow with a honeyed Southern accent. But they aren't sweet. The renowned civil rights attorney speaks of what still needs to be done with a rapid-fire urgency that suggests there's no time to sugar the conversation with complacency or self-congratulation.

As the keynote speaker at tonight's Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Dinner, Dees might review a victory or two -- he has had many as co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center -- but his focus will be on the future.

"I want to point out how the march continues; I want to challenge (people) to the task that lies ahead," Dees says. "Most people ask the question, 'How have things changed since Dr. King passed away?' I may mention that briefly, but I want to talk about some of the issues that were put in motion by the civil rights movement."

Among those issues, which he rattles off over the phone from his office in Alabama, are rights for women, gays and lesbians, those with disabilities, and migrant workers.

Dees, who turned 70 in December, seems to keep adding things to his to-do list. The Southern Poverty Law Center continues to monitor hate groups of all sorts, promotes an educational program to schools across the country, and keeps filing lawsuits that make a difference, including ones that have bankrupted white supremacist groups.

It is Dees' impulse to take action, again and again, despite hazard and harassment, that impresses Jerry Enomoto, a local civil rights pioneer and co-chair of the King dinner event.

"To have a white man committed as much as he is to what is very dangerous work, subjecting himself to numerous death deaths; it's not too often you find anyone with his background doing what he does," Enomoto says. "What he's done is very clear evidence of that dedication -- of his own idea of what's right and a sense of justice."

The theme of this year's dinner is, "Individuals Making a Difference." The event's hosts and key- note speaker embody the notion aptly.

Enomoto, a retired United States marshal, was the first Asian American director of California's Department of Corrections. His wife, Dorothy Enomoto, was the first African American woman to become the agency's deputy director.

Enomoto, 80, and his wife, who doesn't share her age but proudly admits being a classmate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., held the first dinner in King's honor in their Sacramento home in 1998.

Now, it takes place in the Sacramento Convention Center, draws more than 1,000 and typically sells out. Proceeds benefit local nonprofit programs.

The event includes presentation of the Robert Matsui community service award. This year's recipient is C.C. Yin, who is being honored for his work with the California State Asian Pacific Islander Association's voter-education efforts.

Behind the event is a desire to keep up morale and momentum for expanding civil rights.

"I think if you've been around as long as I have you cultivate patience, but in this kind of arena -- of civil rights -- you have to feel the pace of change is too slow," Jerry Enomoto says. "Today, I think there is a mistaken assumption that there is no problem anymore. We're certainly a lot better off today than 20 years ago, but there's still a lot to be done."

Dees' current to-do list includes the Immigrant Justice Project within the SPLC. It has filed lawsuits representing migrant forestry workers as well as immigrant workers enlisted in cleanup work after Hurricane Katrina.

"The migrants are the sharecroppers of the 21st century," Dees says.

Dees, though not one to linger on the past when it comes to his victories, frequently points to history to find lessons that still apply. When it comes to Latino migrant workers, he compares their experiences and prospects with those of Irish Americans, long before John F. Kennedy was elected president.

"I think one day we'll elect a Rodriguez or a Garcia president," he says. "If it was 1850 and I was in Boston and I was making a speech, and I would say one of these Irish Catholics coming into this country would be president of the United States, I would be booed off the stage. They were lynching Irish Catholics."

Dees touches on history again in speaking of political clashes between minority communities, including African Americans and Latinos.

"You've got kind of a struggle between blacks and Latinos; it's the same kind of struggle perpetuated by the powers that be after the Civil War and during the Jim Crow laws," Dees says. Back then, poor whites competing at the margins of the economy were told that they would lose out as African Americans made gains.

"The power structure is doing nothing to build bridges between Latinos and blacks, but to kind of pit them against each other. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the majority can't sit back."

Taking injustice personally set the stage for action for Dees, who grew up picking cotton in small-town Alabama where his father was a tenant farmer.

"We were poor, and I just struggled picking the cotton, and black people pulled the cotton alongside me," he says.

When he became an attorney and opened a law office in 1960 in Montgomery, Ala., some of his first clients were African Americans he already knew. Their cases were not large civil rights cases of the sort Dees would eventually take on, but legal tangles of debt and other everyday issues.

"I was representing my friends, and it got personal," Dees says. "I had to lock horns with the power structure; blacks were treated totally second-class."

In 1971, Dees, along with law partner Joseph Levin Jr. and civil rights activist Julian Bond, started the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Dees says he's not as selfless as one might think, and that there are plenty of reasons to care about those with the least.

"The whole Republican political philosophy is good things trickle down," he says. "They actually trickle up."

Besides, Dees doesn't have to worry about his work ever becoming dull.

"I would get bored if I just did regular law," he says.