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“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday.
Flanked by embattled FBI Director Kash Patel, Blanche announced an 11-count federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil rights organization which effectively brought down the Ku Klux Klan.
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The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.
The SPLC spent five decades tracking white supremacists, infiltrating violent extremist groups, and dragging them into court. These are methods the FBI itself routinely employs — or did before it decided that racist militias were good, actually. In fact, the FBI coordinated with SPLC for years, relying on intelligence received from the organization to combat domestic extremists.
But now, as part of the project to undo Reconstruction, the Justice Department hopes to take out the SPLC using the very tools that group used to defeat the KKK. And along the way, they can exculpate every violent bigot who ever swung a tiki torch with murder in his eyes. Those boys weren’t bad, they were just stirred up by outside agitators from the SPLC!
The organization that bankrupted the Klan
The SPLC was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, as a civil rights litigation shop. Its strategy was to file tort suits against the Klan, holding the organization financially responsible for acts of violence perpetrated by its members.
SPLC’s most consequential case involved the 1981 lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. After a jury failed to convict Josephus Anderson, a Black man charged with the murder of a white policeman in Birmingham, members of the United Klans of America (UKA) snatched Donald off the street more or less at random.
“If a Black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man,” argued UKA Titan Bennie Hays, the second-highest Klan official in Alabama, at the weekly meeting of Unit 900.
Two Klansmen abducted Donald, beat him with a tree limb more than a hundred times, and hanged his body from a tree across the street from Hays’ own house.
“A pretty sight,” a Klansman remarked as he watched police gather evidence. “That’s gonna look good on the news.”
The SPLC represented Michael’s mother Beulah Mae Donald in a civil suit against UKA. In 1987, a jury awarded her $7 million in damages, bankrupting the UKA and forcing it to sign over the deed to its headquarters.
But litigation wasn’t SPLC’s only weapon.