LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to John Egerton's 'Poverty Palace' John Egerton's "Poverty Palace" (July issue) is a vulgar and vindictive assault on the integrity of George McGovern and...
...However, I would like to see the Southern Poverty Law Center take other precedent-setting cases besides the ones involving the Ku Klux Klan...
...Unfortunately, the threat of right-wing violence is still with us...
...Rather than contribute to a monotonous round of charges and denials and countercharges in The Progressive's Letters columns, I choose not to respond further...
...In my opinion, you have made an error in judgment in this dismal instance in giving space to such material in the pages of The Progressive...
...Would that more public-interest organizations had such ability...
...Since that first case, lawsuits by our Klanwatch project have ended Klan paramilitary activity in Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina, exposed Klan efforts to acquire stolen U.S...
...Moreover, Egerton lacked permission to quote me...
...Better to suggest ways to spend the money Morris Dees raises than with your snide tone to suggest that being a rich public-interest organization is somehow worse than being poor...
...Joseph J. Levin Jr...
...Areas that the organization's funds and talents could address are capital punishment, jury rigging, and local conspiracies of bank-court-bureaucracy against poor farmers in the South...
...In fact, I emphasized during our talk that I knew little about the Center's fund-raising activities...
...The Southern Poverty Law Center's involvement in combating right-wing terrorism coincided with the well-documented resurgence of Klan activity in the late 1970s...
...The Center is a valuable public resource, with an impressive track record...
...After talking with him, I declined to be interviewed...
...Although the ranks of the Klan may have thinned, membership in neo-Nazi and other white-supremacist groups has swelled...
...Since I resigned as the Center's senior attorney, I have continued to work with members of the Center's staff, for whom I have high regard...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...The author replies: None of what Ira A. Burnim and Joseph J. Levin Jr...
...In a brief off-the-record conversation, he described the nature of his project...
...His complaint seems id be that Morris Dees is an effective money-raiser...
...say in their reactions to my article causes me to feel that I was in error...
...Michael O'Kiersey River Forest, Illinois As one who has supported the Southern Poverty Law Center, I deplore the tone of John Egerton's article...
...I am angry at being duped...
...I have given it $235 since 1982-a lot of money for a retired school teacher...
...I did not make the remark attributed to me about the Center's direct-mail fund-raising operation...
...Our appeals attempt to capture the feelings that motivate our efforts and are similar in tone to those of Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace, Common Cause, and People for the American Way...
...He called to ask if he could interview me for his article...
...In light of the vagaries of direct-mail fund-raising, we hope to raise sufficient funds to be self-sustaining...
...military weapons and use active-duty U.S...
...John Egerton Nashville, Tennessee The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...The author could surely have found a wider audience and an enthusiastic publisher in the Reader's Digest...
...Suffice it to say that Morris Dees attends the synagogue more than he attends the Baptist church, that there are no such things as "Jewish ZIP codes," that Morris never defended any Klans-men charged with beating freedom riders, that Morris obviously did not volunteer to help Senator McGovern in order to get a mailing list, as the article ridiculously implies, that we never have been accused by The New York Times of changing the meaning of any of its stories (actually, we regularly use reprints from The New York Times with full permission), and that we have never implied that Jefferson Davis was behind Klan lynchings (actually, the Klan was founded by Six former Con-federate soldiers and first led by a former Confederate general...
...I researched and wrote the piece with great care, and I stand on it as written...
...In 1978, we stopped fund-raising when we thought we had reached this point, but double-digit inflation and an expanded work load caused us to renew our appeals for support...
...In addition to portraying the threat of right-wing violence and the nature of our work in a false light, Egerton's article contains specific inaccuracies that are literally too numerous to mention...
...F. W. Hurst Madison, Wisconsin What a scoop on the Southern "Poverty" Law Center...
...We make no apologies for attempting to build an endowment...
...LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to John Egerton's 'Poverty Palace' John Egerton's "Poverty Palace" (July issue) is a vulgar and vindictive assault on the integrity of George McGovern and Morris Dees...
...I hope Egerton's article will not impair the Center's ability to continue its important work...
...Because we tend to be involved in protracted, precedent-setting cases, the cost of our work is quite high...
...Thank you for being so investigative...
...To keep abreast of the activities of these groups, more than 5,000 law-enforcement agencies subscribe to our Intelligence Report, a bimonthly source of reliable information on hate, groups compiled by our Klanwatch staff...
...Margaret Dutton San Francisco, California I was surprised to find myself quoted in John Egerton's piece on the Southern Poverty Law Center...
...Ira A. Burnim Washington, D.C...
...military personnel to train Klan recruits, stopped the Klan's campaign of terror against Vietnamese fishermen in Galveston Bay, and secured a $7 million judgment against the nation's most notorious Klan group for the lynching of a black man in 1981...
...We took our first Klan case—the defense of a black man charged with shooting a Klansman who had attacked a group of peaceful civil-rights marchers—not because of any perceived fund-raising potential, as John Egerton's article cynically implies, but because a legal-services lawyer urged us to help...
...Our direct-mail fund-raising gives thousands of concerned citizens an opportunity to contribute to our work...
...President and Chairman of the Board Southern Poverty Law Center Washington, D.C...
Vol. 52 • September 1988 • No. 9
