A Lawyer’s Journey, the Morris Dees Story

Dees mentions several violent acts committed by Louis Beam,
the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They include
an attempt to strangle Den Xiaoping when he visited Texas in 1980.

 

Dees sued Beam for violence against Vietnamese fishermen in
Galveston Bay. The outcome was that he put Beam out of business.

 

His entire adult life Morris has been on assassination lists
of the largest, most hateful, most violent organizations in the country. He’s
had to wear body armor, carry a gun, put in all kinds of security at home
and at the office, be surrounded by body guards (cost: $18,000 per month).

 

Here is a summary of what Morris has accomplished (up
until the book was published in 2001):

 

1982 - Morris put Louis Beam, the Grand Dragon of the Texas
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, out of business. 

 

1987 - Morris put Glenn Miller’s White Patriots Party (WPP)
[previously called the Confederate Knights of the KKK, and prior to that, the
Carolina Knights of the KKK] out of business. The WPP was being trained by
active-duty military, and was receiving stolen military equipment, including 13
LAW rockets that could pierce 11” armor. They were attempting to obtain a $7500
rocket that would blow up SPLC’s new, fortified, building. The leader, Glenn
Miller, went underground, but surfaced again this year, as Frazier Glenn
Miller, when he killed three people at the Jewish Community Center in Overland
Park, near Kansas City.

 

1987 - Morris put Robert Shelton’s United Klans of America
(UKA) out of business when an all-white jury in the South awarded $7 million to
the plaintiff. The UKA had been the largest Klan group in the country. It beat
the Freedom Riders in 1961; bombed the Sixteen Street Baptist Church and killed
four girls in 1963; killed Viola Luizzo in Selma in 1965.

 

1988 - Morris put Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR)
out of business when a jury awarded $12.5 million to the plaintiff.

 

1998 - Morris put Horace King’s Christian Knights of the KKK
out of business when a jury in Clarendon County, South Carolina awarded over
$37 million to the plaintiff.

 

2000 - Morris put Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations out of
business when a jury awarded $6.3 million to the plaintiffs. Butler had tried
to kill Morris Dees when he gave a speech at Southern Illinois University in
1998.

 

I loved this book. Near the end Morris tells of correcting a
CNN commentator who had made a stupid comment about Shakespeare saying “First,
kill all the lawyers.” Morris called him and ask him to read Henry VI
carefully: “…you’ll see that what Shakespeare really said was, ‘If tyranny is
to prevail, we must first kill all the lawyers.’”

 

Morris is my age — one year older. He says that he is
walking slower, can no longer put in 18-20 hour days, and that his short-term
memory is not as good. But on the last page he writes:

I will always be a trial lawyer at heart. No higher calling
has come my way. Clarence Darrow, the lawyer whose life spurred my decision to
enter the arena*, …told a jury…”It is but an episode in the great battle for
human liberty, a battle [of] tyranny and oppression [that] will not end so long
as the children of one father shall be compelled to toil [in poverty] to
support the children of another in luxury and ease.”

 

Morris concludes with this:

No conservative Supreme Court of reactionary Congress or
wrong-headed Administration and no movement to frustrate our civil justice
system can succeed. The gates of justice that sadly are being closed today to
the powerless will come crashing open by the tidal wave trial lawyers can set
in motion.

 

Trial lawyers hold the keys to the gates of justice. This is
an awesome responsibility.

 

*Morris Dees was earning millions in the direct mail
business. He had closed his law office. Then one night a storm caused his plane
to be diverted from Chicago to Cincinnati. Killing time he picked up Clarence
Darrow’s book, The Story of My Life. It changed Morris Dees’ life.