Morris Dees tells Legal Affairs Editor CAROL COULTERthat white people in US will be in the minority by 2040
IT WILL be a “long shot” for President Barack Obama to win the next presidential election, says a leading US civil rights lawyer.
Morris Dees, an Alabama-based lawyer who was the financial director of Jimmy Carter’s election campaign, campaign director for Senator George McGovern’s failed bid for the presidency, and an Obama supporter, says there has recently been a huge mobilisation of right-wing forces in the US.
The “Tea Party” movement and the constant denunciations from talkshow hosts has emboldened groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, of which there are now 950, he says. There has also been a revival of militia “patriot” groups, increasing by 240 per cent in the past year. The last time they had been active was when Timothy McVeigh carried out a bomb attack in the city of Oklahoma in 1995, which killed 168 people, including 19 children under the age of six. There are also 1,800 “nativist” groups, who oppose Latino immigration, and the rhetoric of the hundreds of thousands of people involved is becoming mainstream, he says.
“America is changing,” says Dees. “What we are seeing is growing resistance to it. People like us [white people] will be in a minority in the year 2040, and Asians, Latinos and African-Americans will be in the majority. Overlaying that is the economic crisis.
“The US is no longer the first economic power; 70 per cent of GNP is from consumerism, and 30 per cent from production. That’s the exact opposite of China. It’s a huge drain on economic wealth. You can’t run a country on consumerism.”
However, he stresses that, despite his involvement in politics, he is a lawyer, not a politician, and a trial lawyer, not a jurist. One of the cases he took and won in the 1960s was that of a black man who wanted to become a state trooper. This led to the integration of the Alabama police.
More recently, the organisation he set up, the Southern Poverty Law Center, won a case against Del Monte who were using Latino labour from Central America to pick onions. The firm claimed the workers were working for a local labour boss, who was paying them less than a third of the legally required wage. The court ruled that Del Monte and companies like it could not hide behind the fiction of “labour bosses” to avoid paying minimum wages.
Dees, who was born in 1935 into a tenant farming family in Alabama, grew up and worked among black fellow cotton- pickers. When he qualified as a lawyer he found his childhood friends needed legal help, and his civil rights work began.
“Civil Rights lawyers always come from among the oppressed,” he says. “It was colonists like John Adams against the British loyalists, the Irish in the mid-19th century produced Clarence Durrow, east European Jews produced great lawyers like Cardozo, and the most recent group is the African Americans who produced Thurgood Marshall and many unsung black civil rights lawyers.” As a result of Dees’s work 30 people are serving sentences for plotting to kill him or attack the law centre.