A Season for Justice: The Life and Times of Civil Rights Lawyer Morris Dees

The grandson of a Klansman, who engineered the landmark civil suit that bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan, recounts the story of his battles against racism in the New South

In 1987 an all-white jury in a civil suit in Alabama found Ku Klux Klansmen guilty of murder and awarded $7 million to Beulah Mae Donald, a black woman whose son Michael had been their victim. Morris Dees, the prosecuting lawyer who engineered this landmark case, is cofounder of the Montgomery, Ala., Southern Poverty Law Center, an indefatigable foe of racism and a champion of civil rights. The grandson of a Klansman, gutsy, straight-talking Dees overcame "a lifetime of indoctrination" to spearhead such trailblazing cases as those involving the segregation of the Montgomery, Ala., YMCA and the exclusion of minorities from Southern juries. This electrifying, moving autobiography, written with Fiffer, a Chicago lawyer, is as notable for its tense courtroom dramas as for its intimate portrayal of a South in the throes of change. The book's close-up account of the ugly violence perpetrated by the Klan and other white-supremacist groups in the 1980s is shocking. Photos. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After Federal Judge Frank Johnson, noted civil rights lawyer Dees is the "second most hated man in Alabama." As he admits in this brash and boastful autobiography, "you've got to be doing something good to get so many folks mad at you." The grandson of a Klansman, he used the proceeds from the sale of a successful business to co-found the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. Dedicated to fighting racial injustice, Dees won such notable cases as the desegregation of the Montgomery YMCA and the defense of Joan Little, a black woman accused of murdering her white jailer after he raped her. With the creation of Klanwatch in 1980, he fought the Klu Klux Klan in the courts, triumphing in the 1987 landmark civil suit that bankrupted the KKK and that gave its headquarters to the mother of a lynching victim. While Dees's self-congratulatory tone can be off-putting, his description of his Alabama childhood and his growing realization that segregation was an evil that had to be destroyed makes this book a necessary purchase for all libraries. BOMC alternate; see also Bill Stanton's Klanwatch , LJ 5/1/91.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.