How the "Southern Poverty Law Center" Got That Undeniably Awkward Name
“Southern Poverty Law Center” was the name settled on by the three men who met in Montgomery, Alabama (site of Martin Luther King's famous bus boycott) in July, 1971 (when the assassination of Martin Luther King was still fresh on everyone's mind) to incorporate their new non-profit organization. The men declared their new charity a “civil rights” organization, even though all the great civil rights battles had already been won by organizations like the Students Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group co-founded by Martin Luther King. These groups carried enormous moral weight. The SCLC, in particular, in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, was imbued with mountains of moral authority and well-wishes from the American people.
For Morris Dees, one of those three original incorporators, all that moral authority and good will was the lowest of hanging fruit. Dees was a talented and successful direct mail marketer with a law degree. He was so good at junk mail—at getting strangers to put their own money in an envelope and mail it to him—he's in the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. But that isn't proof he chose the name “Southern Poverty Law Center” for its acronym, SPLC. Maybe he appreciated the name “Southern Poverty Law Center” for its simple elegance.
And was it the fault of Joe Levin, the second of the three original incorporators, if people got a little confused between the SPLC and the SNCC or the SCLC or, for that matter, the SBLC, the Southern Baptist Leadership Council, which is what some people called the organization1 Martin Luther King co-founded in Atlanta with another Southern Baptist preacher named Ralph Abernathy.
Rev. Abernathy took over the SCLC after Martin Luther King's murder and was still running the SCLC in 1971 when Morris Dees, Joe Levin, and the third original incorporator, Charles Abernathy, founded the SPLC. And what a spectacular financial success it's been, too. Compared to my—wait, did you say Charles Abernathy? As in Abernathy, co-founder of the SBLC?
No, no, Abernathy, co-founder of the SPLC. That Abernathy is not a black Southern Baptist preacher who marched that long hard road with Martin Luther King. He is a white law professor at Georgetown. He signed the incorporating documents in 1971 then dropped out of the picture—as if he were there just to lend his name. Today, Charles Abernathy isn’t listed on the SPLC’s About Us page as one of the co-founders. You have to go to the Alabama Secretary of State’s website and look up the SPLC’s incorporating document. There he is!
According to WordNet, 1 in 14,285 American families has the last name "Abernathy". That means there is only a .02 percent chance the SPLC would have an Abernathy co-founder by sheer coincidence, and a 99.98 percent chance it was a deliberate attempt to deceive Americans and to cash in on the sacrifice, suffering, and hard work of others.
The SPLC has been a grift from the get-go. It was founded on a lie, milking for its own self-enrichment not just black pain, but the defining event of black pain. It has built its fantastic wealth by using deception and trickery to cash in on the hard work and sacrifice of others. The SPLC, the premiere practitioner of the politics of personal destruction, destroys others using wealth they gained by cynically exploiting the memory of a man whose consistent message was always peace and goodwill from all to all.
From an article about memorial observances for King in the January 12, 1972 New York Times: "Mr. Wyatt, a member of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Greater New York, a chief sponsor of the observances, urged citizens to take a day off from work “in memory of this great man,” or to forward a day's pay to the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference in Atlanta."