Civil rights attorney Dees to speak at commencement

Civil rights attorney Dees to speak at commencement

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Civil rights attorney Morris Dees will deliver
the address to graduating students at the Class of 2001
Commencement, set for May 12.

The announcement that Dees will be the commencement speaker
was made last week by the President’s Office. Dees
presented a President’s Lecture Series talk in January,
speaking to a packed crowd at the Rice Memorial Center.

“Decades ago Morris Dees was an early,
eloquent speaker for the ‘New South,’ battling
prejudice and intolerance and violence with courage and
determination,” commented President Malcolm Gillis.
“His was a lonely fight in the ’60s; today he
has millions of allies across the nation. He is truly an
outstanding American, an outstanding human.”

Born in Shorter, Ala., Dees has devoted much of his life
to civil rights. As chief trial counsel at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group he founded in 1971
in Montgomery, Ala., Dees has specialized in lawsuits involving
civil rights violations and racially motivated crimes.

Dees won a landmark trial Sept. 7 when a jury awarded $6.3
million to a woman and her son, ruling that white supremacist
leader Richard Butler was negligent in letting guards from
his Aryan Nations compound chase down and shoot at Victoria
Keenan and her son, Jason, in 1998.

The case was the latest of many landmark trials that Dees
has won. In 1990, he won a $12.5 million verdict for the
family of an Ethiopian man beaten to death by a group of
skinheads in Portland, Ore. Last year, Dees won a $37.8
million verdict against the Christian Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan for the burning of the Macedonia Baptist Church
in South Carolina.

Dees turned to his crusade for civil rights after selling
a successful publishing company that he founded after graduating
from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1961.

In his autobiography, “A Season for Justice,” the son of a farmer and cotton-gin operator recounted his
decision to become actively involved in the civil rights
movement after a night of soul-searching in a snowed-in
Cincinnati airport.

“When my plane landed in Chicago, I was ready to take
that step, to speak out for my black friends who were still
‘disenfranchised,’ even after the Voting Rights
Act of 1965. Little had changed in the South. Whites held
the power and had no intention of voluntarily sharing it,” Dees wrote.

“I had made up my mind. I would sell the company as
soon as possible and specialize in civil rights law. All
the things in my life that had brought me to this point,
all the pulls and tugs of my conscience, found a singular
peace. It did not matter what my neighbors would think,
or the judges, the bankers or even my relatives.”

In addition to his autobiography, Dees is the author of “Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat”
and “Hate on Trial: The Case Against America’s
Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi.” A made-for-television movie
about his life, “Line of Fire,” aired on NBC in
1991, and he was portrayed in the 1996 movie “Ghosts
of Mississippi” about the life of slain civil rights
worker Medgar Evers.

Dees pushed for the construction of the Civil Rights Memorial
in Montgomery. Designed by Maya Lin, who also designed the
U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the
Civil Rights Memorial bears the names of 40 men, women and
children who lost their lives during the civil rights movement.

The 2001 commencement will be held on the Academic Quad
starting at 8:30 a.m.