A Special Message From Morris Dees and Richard Cohen

As we look forward to 2010, all of us at the SPLC would like to thank our friends and supporters for their help in our fight against injustice. Together, we will push back against the forces of hate and extremism, win justice for abused children and exploited workers, teach lessons of tolerance to millions of students and much more.

Our work will only get tougher in 2010.

As we predicted last year, there's been an ugly, racist backlash to President Obama's election. And hatemongers are exploiting the bitterness felt by Americans during tough economic times by stoking anger against minorities and recent immigrants.

With unemployment predicted to remain high this year, we worry that contentious issues like immigration reform will unleash even more hate and extremism. Victims of injustice will be looking to us for help.

We won a great courtroom victory against the head of the Imperial Klans of America — a $2.5 million verdict on behalf of a teen who was severely beaten by Klansmen at a county fair in Kentucky. We're continuing to fight the appeal in that case.

Every day, our investigators are pulling back the curtain on hate groups, making it harder for them to operate in the shadows. As last year began, we documented 926 hate groups operating in America — a record number and an increase of more than 50 percent since 2000. Since then, we've seen the forces of extremism grow even stronger. In the months that followed Obama's inauguration, six law enforcement officers — including a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum — were murdered by racial extremists.

The last time we saw this kind of boiling rage was 1994. At that time, we warned the federal government that the "mixture of armed groups and those who hate is a recipe for disaster." Six months later, 168 people were murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Last year, we uncovered alarming evidence that potentially violent militias — armed groups steeped in bizarre conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies about the government — are once again on the rise. We alerted law enforcement agencies and briefed key congressional committees on the dangers posed by these groups. One federal law enforcement agent told us: "All it's lacking is a spark."

We also exposed a cauldron of anti-Latino hate in Suffolk County, New York — a microcosm for the violence that's occurring in communities across the country. It was there that Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was beaten and stabbed to death by a group of teenagers who regularly went "hunting" Latinos for sport. Our report is having a major impact. The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil rights investigation into the police department's handling of hate crimes, and community leaders are demanding answers.

We're also winning justice for migrant workers who face an array of abuses, and we're mounting a national campaign to protect low-income immigrant women from sexual violence in the fields and factories. In one case, we're suing a North Carolina yarn factory for the brutal assault of a woman who had warned company officials about her plant manager's sexual harassment.

Winning justice for children

What's more, we're stopping the shocking abuse of children — many of whom have mental disabilities — in detention centers in the South. And we're leading an effort to stop the incarceration of children for minor misbehavior in school. Last year we filed suit in federal court to reform a Biloxi, Miss., lock-up where there were 37 suicide attempts in the past two years. Because of our suit, children and teens will no longer be confined to their cells for 23 hours each day and forced to sleep on the floor in filthy, bug-infested conditions while being denied education and mental health services.

In classrooms across America, we're delivering lessons of respect and tolerance to millions of schoolchildren. We owe it to the next generation to do everything we can to stamp out bigotry and hate.

Right now, because of our recent successes and the increase in far-right extremism, our security team is on high alert. Here is just one of the threats we've received: "I hope and pray every day that Dees and Cohen get the justice they deserve and are killed painfully. Amen."

It's not pleasant to receive threats like that, of course, but it's an inevitable part of the work we do. We have great confidence in the ability of our security team to protect us and the SPLC staff.

We also have great confidence in you — our friends and supporters — to carry the message of fairness and understanding into communities throughout our great country. Standing together, we can make a difference in 2010. From the entire staff at the SPLC, we wish you all the best in the coming year.

Morris Dees
Chief Trial Counsel

J. Richard Cohen
President