“Selfishness and greed have toppled many great empires in the past,” Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees told a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience on May 8.

Unless fairness for all people prevails, he said, frustration among the disadvantaged here could rise to a tragic degree. “One day, there may not be one skyscraper left in this nation.”

Dees wove stories from the Bible, from the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and from his own biography into a compelling, sometimes emotional address lasting nearly an hour.

Some 300 members of the campus community and friends gathered in the College Chapel on a summery afternoon to hear . He was the keynote speaker for the second annual symposium, this year titled Unswerving Values, Changing Times, convened by President Elaine Tuttle Hansen to address the vital work of advancing diversity at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Dees, raised on an Alabama cotton farm, is a lawyer who co-founded the in 1971. Dedicated to seeking legal redress against hate groups, and in more recent years to providing programming that

Dees’ talk at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ resembled the best kind of memoir, as he used tragedies and triumphs from his own life to shape a larger narrative about America’s history of racial injustice, his own journey to the awareness of inequity and the continuing need for love and justice in society.

Titled “With Justice for All in Our Multicultural Nation,” the address began with Dees describing one Vera Belle Johnson, his teacher in a three-room
schoolhouse in Shorter, Ala. Johnson, he explained, “wanted us to grow up to be good citizens . . . fair and honest.”

Christian values and abstention from alcohol and tobacco were high on Mrs. Johnson’s list, said Dees, recalling the day he challenged her with the seeming contradiction in the story of Jesus turning water into wine.

“Yes, Morris,” she retorted, “but we would have thought more highly of him if he hadn’t done that.”

Equally memorable but more influential were Johnson’s efforts to convince Dees and her other pupils of the real value of the words in the Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation, with liberty and justice for all.”

It took the work of civil rights leader King, Dees continued, to “ensure that America lived up to its promises of equality written in the Constitution.”

One day King told a crowd in a Memphis church about seeing the distant Promised Land from a mountaintop. He said, “I may not get there with you, but it’s going to be a land of fairness and justice and liberty for all.” King was assassinated the next day.

Similarly, Dees said, Moses brought his people out of Egypt and to the river shore opposite the Promised Land, but they didn’t cross. Instead, the Jews wandered in the wilderness for another 40 years before they crossed the River Jordan.

“It is ironic today,” Dees said, “that we are standing on the river and, so to speak, looking across, and it’s been 40 years since the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King left us.”

“Are we going to turn and go back? Are we going to wander around in this wilderness, where we’ve made some progress but not a lot of progress, in human rights? Or are we going to step out and attempt to make changes?”

A highlight of Dees’ talk was his 1981 defense of Vietnamese immigrants who had fled their country after the communist victory and had overcome considerable hardship to establish themselves as shrimpers in Texas. The Ku Klux Klan then employed the usual tactics to force them out of the industry.

Dees and the shrimpers were at the threshold of a legal victory, in the form of a federal injunction against the white supremacists, when a group of
Vietnamese businesspeople asked that the lawsuit be dropped. Why? Fear of retaliation against their own businesses.

“Please, please don’t drop your lawsuit,” Dees implored the shrimpers, using King’s example to illustrate the ultimate power of the U.S. legal system. But, he told the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience, “I could see fear in their faces. It wasn’t me who had to live in that community.”

In the end, the shrimpers hung tough and the injunction went through, Dees said. On the day the shrimping season opened, as an early fog lifted, he was among the crowd on the waterfront in Kemah, Texas, as the shrimp fleet including the Vietnamese boats received a priest’s blessing and headed out to sea. “I not only felt proud to be their lawyer, I felt proud to be an American,” he said.

Dees’ dominant theme came to the fore as he interpreted the Old Testament story of the prophet Amos. A farmer visiting the city of Bethel, Amos was appalled by the gap he saw between the rich establishment and the disenfranchised poor.

In Dees’ version, Amos told the powers-that-be that “you’ve got a good thing going here. But you won’t get to keep what you have and pass it down to the future generations unless you’re fair to all the people. Because if you’re not fair to all the people, they’re going to take what you have away from you.”

“Amos spoke to the people of that ancient city in the words that Dr. King chose to speak to us,” Dees told the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience, “when he stood on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and begged this nation to live up to its promises of equality.”

“Amos said to those people, ‘Don’t be satisfied, folks, until justice rolls down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ ”

Dees’ theme was anticipated in opening remarks by President Hansen. She reminded the gathering of the substance of last year’s symposium, which explored the changing demographics of the student population.

“This afternoon we come together again to that perpetual task of changing and preparing ourselves to do the right thing,” she said, “which requires not just reacting to what we think may be coming, but proactively building an educational environment to house and nurture the capacities needed to sustain a thriving multicultural nation and a peaceful global society.”

Offering a brief introduction to Dees’ life and accomplishments, Trustee Dana Peterson Moore ’79 described Dees as “an eyewitness and a warrior in the civil rights movement.”

She told Dees, “We’re very hungry to learn from you how justice for all can be secured in these changing times.”

Morris Dees, founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, will deliver a keynote address, With Justice for All in Our Multicultural Nation, at 4 p.m. May 8 in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Chapel.

Hosted by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, this second annual Presidential Symposium on Unswerving Values, Changing Times is free and open to the public. Hansen notes that Dees’ topic supports the college’s longstanding commitment to offering an outstanding liberal arts education to a broad array of talented students.

“Today more than ever, greater access to higher education is an urgent need,” Hansen says.  “And as we strive to deepen ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ diversity, broadly defined, we must prepare all our students to learn from its complexity and to recognize their responsibilities as ethical leaders and global citizens.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971, is dedicated to educational programs that teach tolerance to young students and to seeking legal redress against white supremacist groups. Dees has argued and won cases against the United Klans of America for the lynching of a young black man, against the group Aryan Nations and the White Aryan Resistance for anti-black hate violence, and against the Carolina Klan for burning black churches.

The center’s newest litigation focuses on immigrant civil rights. Noting that this issue is fertile ground for hate groups and other extremists looking to spread their racist beliefs, SPLC reasons that it is important to understand the background and motives of the groups shaping the debate about immigration.

In 1980, the Southern Poverty Law Center founded the Intelligence Project in response to resurgence in organized racist activity. The project monitors hate groups and develops legal strategies for protecting citizens from violence-prone groups. A made-for-television movie about Dees aired on NBC, “Line of Fire” describes his successful fight against the Ku Klux Klan.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, under Dees’ leadership, broke new ground in anti-bias education in 1991, when it began supporting the efforts of K-12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and an appreciation of diversity. The program, known as “Teaching Tolerance,” has earned accolades from a variety of national organizations, including three Oscar nominations, two Academy Awards and more than 20 honors from the Educational Press Association of America.

Dees has received numerous awards in connection with his work at the Center. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice named him Trial Lawyer of the Year. He received the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award and was awarded the Friend of Education Award by the National Education Association. In 2006, the National Law Journal listed him among the 100 most influential lawyers in America.

The college, which is working with the Lewiston-Auburn community to schedule programs that oppose hatred and bias, also plans teach-ins on Jan. 8 and 10. All three events are open to the public at no charge.

At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 15, in the college’s Edmund S. Muskie Archives, on Campus Avenue, former Somali Prime Minister discusses the past, present and future of his native country. Galaydh, a visiting professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, served the Somali government in a variety of positions and became prime minister following the 2000 Somali National Peace Conference, serving until December 2001.

The first teach-in is a three-hour discussion and training session on nonviolent political action sponsored by the Multicultural Center. Beginning at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 8, the gathering features presentations by three activists, two of whom are connected to the 1979 tragedy known as the . A car caravan of 40 Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis attacked and opened fire on 100 men, women and children preparing for an anti-KKK march in North Carolina. Several in the crowd were wounded and five were killed.

Presenters include Greensboro Justice Fund (GJF) founder and trustee Lewis Pitts, senior managing attorney for legal services of North Carolina’s Advocates for Children’s Services department. He was lead counsel in the civil rights litigation stemming from the Greensboro Massacre. GJF assists grassroots organizations in working for racial justice and economic empowerment.

Also scheduled to appear is Signe Waller, a GJF trustee and author of the book Love & Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). She was an eyewitness to the 1979 attack in which her husband, Jim Waller, was murdered.

The third participant, attorney Dexter Wimbish, serves as the national program director of the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), founded in 1979 as the National Anti-Klan Network. CDR serves as a national clearinghouse for research-based advocacy designed to counter the effects of racism and bigotry.

The second teach-in, titled The Ideology of Hate: Past and Present, will be offered at 4:15 p.m. Friday, Jan. 10. Professor of History Steve Hochstadt, who teaches about the Holocaust of European Jewry, will explore perspectives of the past. Steve Wessler, director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, and Kelvin Datcher, outreach coordinator for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), will discuss contemporary U.S. hate groups.

The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, at the University of Southern Maine, is committed to making schools and workplaces safer by developing innovative ways to help stakeholders reduce the bias, prejudice and harassment that leads to violence, and by helping schools and communities respond to hate crimes.

SPLC is a nonprofit organization that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation.

The teach-ins will also take place at the Muskie Archives.

At the Humphrey Institute, Galaydh teaches about the politics of public affairs, strategies for economic development and the role of nongovernmental organizations in governance. He supports the outreach mission of the Humphrey Institute by working with the Minneapolis Somali community, the largest in the United States.

Galaydh was an official in the Ministry of the Interior during Somalia’s last democratically elected government, in the mid-1960s. During the 1970s, he headed two large sugar-processing operations before being appointed minister of industry in 1980. He was one of 650 delegates at the 2000 Somali National Peace Conference, held in Djibouti, and served as prime minister from September 2000 until December 2001.

In keeping with an egalitarian tradition pre-dating the Civil War, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has helped welcome Somali immigrants to the Lewiston area and has participated readily in efforts to show that hate and prejudice have no haven in this community. In an open letter soliciting ideas and participation, former Chaplain Kerry Maloney, former Dean of the College James Carignan and former Dean of Students Celeste Branham thanked the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community for reaffirming the college’s commitment to issues of “social justice and respect for the dignity of every person. We will continue to work together to oppose any group or person who aims to incite hatred, bias, violence and division within our community.”

[For more information about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ response to the WCC, visit the .]

[See a slideshow of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-hosted diversity rally on Jan. 11 at Merrill Gymnasium.]