The Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) retains $162 million dollars in investments outside of the United States, even as contributions declined considerably in the wake of a scandal that forced the retirement of co-founder Morris Dees.
Reporting published Wednesday by the Washington Free Beacon revealed the current state of the much remarked upon Montgomery group.
Their work shows the Center paid Dees, former SPLC president Richard Cohen and former legal director Rhonda Brownstein six-figure severance packages after accusations of sexual harassment by Dees and assertions of racial discrimination by the staff at large forced them to quit in shame.
The financial documents brought to light by the Beacon cover the group’s dealings from Nov. 1, 2018, through Oct. 31, 2019.
Accusations of lavish spending on salaries and offices along with reportedly poor treatment of black Americans had dogged the SPLC for decades before the media firestorm pushed out top leadership in early 2018.
SPLC employees have for years cheekily referred to their ostentatious Montgomery office as the Poverty Palace, a wry reference to the results of the prodigious fundraising abilities of the organization that do not always make it into the hands of the people for whom the group purports to advocate.
In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a series of pieces exposing, in particular, the dearth of black staffers in an organization that purports itself to be a force for racial justice.
Bob Morse, who worked at the SPLC for a number of years in the 2000s, wrote an article after Dees retired that was published in the New Yorker magazine. In the piece, Morse reveals that it was common practice for new female employees at SPLC to be “warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women.”
In 2018, when these behaviors finally caught up to Dees and the top brass of SPLC, they were paid over $1 million despite being forced to retire early in the year.
According to the Beacon, “Dees was paid $338,000 in base compensation and $35,000 in other reportable compensation, the tax forms show. Cohen collected $373,000 in base compensation, nearly $10,000 in other reportable compensation, and received a severance payment of $216,318. Brownstein was paid $233,062 in base compensation, given $2,000 in other reportable compensation, and received a severance payment of $131,283.”
Dees and his then much smaller organization did laudable work in the 1970s for the cause of racial equality.
By the 1980s, the SPLC began focusing on its now much-publicized efforts to discover and catalog hate groups in America and has had some success revealing some of the vilest groups in American society.
However, the group has come under fire in recent years for expanding its definition of hate groups beyond what the term is commonly understood to mean, in a move some say was meant to juice contributions.
The bad press generated by Dees’ removal and the larger executive shake-up appear to have hampered the group’s ability to raise money.
The SPLC received $97 million in contributions for the fiscal year ending October 2019, a 27% decrease from the fiscal year ending October 2017, when the group received $132 million in support from contributors.
The last full fiscal year before the scandals were exposed was 2017.
The most recent documents available still show the SPLC in control of a $529,801,832 endowment.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: [email protected] or on Twitter @HenryThornton95
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