“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?” “Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.” “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.ĭuring my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. The “professional staff”-the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers-were almost exclusively white. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff-“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security.

preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. The first surprise was the office itself. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S.

Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble-“Until justice rolls down like waters”-and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C.

Making Hate Pay by Tyler O'Neil