Civil rights lawyers turns to immigrants

Bad news for exploitative employers.

By Don Walton

Famed civil rights lawyer Morris Dees is increasingly focused now on Latino immigrant worker rights.

Dees, best-known for legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations and hate groups, spoke with University of Nebraska-Lincoln law students over noon pizza last week.

“Human rights begins close to home,” he reminded them.

The issue is “liberty and justice for all,” he told them.

You can win a case and not only help an individual, but make a difference, score breakthroughs, force or fuel change, impact a nation. Even make history at times.

“Each of you has a front row seat in the history of justice for all,” Dees said. “Do not sit on the sidelines and watch. Do not let history pass you by.

“You hold the keys to the gates of justice,” Dees said.

Even if you choose to ride the elevator to a high-rise legal career, he said, “don’t park your conscience on the ground floor.”

Dees has been so determined and successful as founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery that he’s been targeted for assassination more than once. He never mentioned that.

The son of an Alabama cotton farmer, Dees formed the law center in 1971 after stepping away from business and financial success four years earlier to specialize in civil rights law.

The center has fought the Klan and more recently neo-Nazi organizations and hate groups. It represents the Jena 6 in Louisiana, and its case docket currently includes a lawsuit against the Klan over a beating at a county fair in Kentucky.

But the center also is battling Del Monte Foods on behalf of migrant farm workers who aren’t being paid federal wage rates.

A number of human rights cases involving immigrants are listed on the center’s Web site.

Illegal immigrants are especially subject to employer abuse because of their vulnerability.

Latino workers, as well as other immigrants, come to the United States primarily for jobs, Dees said, sometimes migrating here because failed U.S. policies adversely affected conditions in their own countries.

If there was a 30-day work stoppage by every undocumented worker, he said, the effects on the U.S. economy could be staggering.

They are part of the fabric now.

“America is great because of its diversity and differences, not in spite of them,” he said.

One day, Dees said, CNN’s Lou Dobbs “will be depicted like George Wallace,” the Alabama governor who preached segregation and fanned the flames of racial animosity and division.

Dobbs has been a leading voice in arguing against any form of amnesty or refuge for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already settled in the United States.

One student asked Dees to recall his most memorable case.

Dees pointed to a 1987 case in which he won a jury verdict requiring the Klan to pay $6 million to an African-American woman whose 19-year-old son, Michael Donald, had been beaten and lynched in Mobile, Ala.

The Klan had to turn over its national headquarters to Donald’s mother to pay the settlement.

And then she sold it and used the money to purchase her first home.