Impact Report

1970 – A federal court rules that the Montgomery, Alabama, YMCA must end its policy of racial discrimination. SPLC co-founder Morris Dees filed the case, Smith v. YMCA, after two Black children were turned away from a YMCA summer camp.

1971 – Morris Dees and Joe Levin formally incorporate the SPLC. Julian Bond is named as its first president. 

1972 – In Selmont Improvement District et. al. v. Dallas County Commission et. al., the SPLC rectified a 20-year injustice when a federal court ordered the paving of 10 miles of streets in an unincorporated Black neighborhood near Selma in Dallas County, Alabama. The new streets had to be equal in quality to those installed free in adjacent white neighborhoods in 1954.

1972 – A federal court accepts the SPLC’s reapportionment plan for the Alabama Legislature. It is later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The plan followed the SPLC’s Nixon v. Brewer lawsuit that claimed Black people were underrepresented. Seventeen Black lawmakers are elected to the Alabama Legislature in 1974, the first election after the reapportionment plan is adopted.

1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the SPLC’s favor in the first successful sex discrimination case against the federal government, Frontiero v. Richardson. It rules the Department of Defense cannot grant certain benefits to dependents of servicemen but not to those of servicewomen.

1973 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirms a ruling banning the use of public recreational facilities by segregated private schools in Gilmore v. City of Montgomery. 

1974 – Three SPLC clients — Jesse Walston, Vernon Brown and Bobby Hines — are freed in August 1974 following two years in a North Carolina prison after being wrongfully charged with raping a white woman. The three Black men, known as the Tarboro Three, faced death sentences.

1975 – SPLC client Joanne Little, a Black incarcerated woman accused of murdering a white jail guard in North Carolina, is acquitted of murder. The guard was found dead in her cell without his pants. Little said he had tried to rape her.

1976 – A federal court rules Alabama prisons are “wholly unfit for human habitation” in Pugh v. Locke. SPLC attorneys work for more than a decade to force the state to bring the prisons up to constitutional standards.

1976 – The SPLC starts “Team Defense” to develop trial strategies for capital cases and share them with attorneys across the U.S. at seminars and in SPLC-published manuals.

1977 – The U.S. Supreme Court opens the door for women to be hired for law enforcement jobs traditionally held by men after ruling in favor of the SPLC in Dothard v. Rawlinson.

1977 – An SPLC lawsuit challenging sterilization abuse funded by the federal government is remanded to U.S. District Court for dismissal after federal officials withdraw the regulations challenged in the case, Relf v. Weinberger.

1980 – The U.S. Supreme Court vacates the convictions of 11 death row inmates in Alabama after affirming the SPLC’s claim in Beck v. Alabama that the state’s death penalty statute is unconstitutional.

1981 – The SPLC creates Klanwatch to monitor Ku Klux Klan activity across the country. It is renamed the Intelligence Project in 1998 after it expands its mission and begins monitoring other hate groups.

1981 – A Klan terror campaign against Vietnamese fishermen in Texas ends and Klan paramilitary training bases are shut down as part of an SPLC lawsuit, Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

1982 – The SPLC wins the release of Johnny Ross, who became the nation’s youngest death row inmate at age 16 after being wrongly convicted of the rape of a white woman in Louisiana in 1975.

1983 – The SPLC wins a financial settlement on behalf of cotton mill workers who contracted brown lung disease, or byssinosis, by inhaling tiny dust particles daily. Following the case, Wilkins v. Lanier, federal regulations were passed to control the dust exposure and require textile companies to provide regular medical screenings.

1983 – Klansmen fire-bomb the SPLC offices on July 28, 1983. More than a year after the bombing, three men are arrested: Tommy Downs and Charles Bailey, members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Joe Garner, a national officer of the group. They are charged with arson and possession of explosives. All three plead guilty and are sentenced to prison.

1984 – A paramilitary unit of the Klan is enjoined from operating as a result of an SPLC lawsuit brought on behalf of Alabama citizens against Klan leader Bill Wilkinson and the Invisible Empire Klan. 

1984 – Kentucky’s tax system, which had virtually exempted un-mined coal from taxation, is reformed after the SPLC files Nowak v. Foster, providing a boost for public schools. 

1985 – A paramilitary Klan group in North Carolina is ordered to stop training and operating. The SPLC brought the case, Person v. Carolina Knights of the KKK, after the group began terrorizing residents.

1987 – The SPLC wins a historic $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America for the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. It marks the end of the notorious United Klans, which was responsible for the deadly bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in the 1960s.

1987 – Alabama state troopers must integrate after the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of the SPLC in its lawsuit, Paradise v. Allen.

1988 – An SPLC appeal wins the release of Roy Patterson from prison in Georgia, 13 years after he was wrongfully convicted of murdering a police officer. Patterson acted in self-defense when a state trooper and a policeman attacked him and his wife and child.

1988 – A federal jury assesses nearly $1 million in damages against two Klan groups and 11 followers responsible for an attack on peaceful marchers in Forsyth County, Georgia. The SPLC sued on behalf of the marchers in McKinney v. Southern White Knights. The Invisible Empire was eventually forced to pay damages and disband.

1989 – The Civil Rights Memorial, created by Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is dedicated by the SPLC at its office in Montgomery. In 2005, the Civil Rights Memorial Center, an interactive visitor’s center, opens in the SPLC’s former office.

1989 – The SPLC wins a settlement against members of the Invisible Empire Klan who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with bats, ax handles and guns in Decatur, Alabama, in 1979. The Klansmen must attend a race relations course taught by the leaders of the group they attacked.

1990 – The SPLC wins a $12.5 million judgment against Tom and John Metzger and their hate group, White Aryan Resistance, for their role in the murder of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw by racist skinheads in Portland, Oregan.

1991 – Teaching Tolerance, a program to provide free classroom materials on tolerance and diversity to teachers, is launched. A year later, the program releases its first teaching kit, America’s Civil Rights Movement. The accompanying documentary film, A Time for Justice, wins a 1995 Academy Award in the short documentary category.

1991 – The SPLC brings dramatic changes to the way child welfare authorities provide for children with special mental health needs with the settlement of R.C. v. Fuller. 

1993 – The Confederate battle flag is removed from atop the Alabama Capitol after the SPLC wins Holmes v. Hunt. The flag had flown atop the building since Gov. George Wallace raised it in 1963 as a symbol of defiance to integration efforts.

1994 – The SPLC begins investigating white supremacist activity within the antigovernment militia movement. Six months before the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, Morris Dees writes a letter warning U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno of the danger posed by militias.

1994 – The SPLC wins a $1 million default judgment against the Church of the Creator in the 1991 slaying of a Black sailor, Harold Mansfield, by one of the group’s reverends.

1995 – Indigent dialysis patients in Alabama receive state-funded transportation to medical care following an SPLC lawsuit brought on behalf of these patients who sometimes went without food to afford transportation. Although the case, Harris v. James, was ultimately overturned on appeal, Alabama Medicaid recipients continue to receive transportation.

1996 – Alabama prisons are forced to abandon the use of brutal prisoner chain gangs following an SPLC lawsuit, Austin v. James.

1998 – A South Carolina jury awards the largest judgment ever against a hate group in Macedonia v. Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The Christian Knights, its state leader and four other Klansmen are ordered to pay $37.8 million (later reduced to $21.5 million) for conspiring to burn Macedonia Baptist Church, an African American church.

1998 – A homeless African American teenager is enrolled in an Alabama high school after being denied admission to a school because of her homeless status and steered away from another because of her race. The SPLC lawsuit, Penny Doe v. Richardson, led to a state policy that complied with federal law and ensured that local schools live up to their responsibility to educate homeless children.

1999 – Klansman Wallace Weicherding and New Order leader Dennis McGiffen are sent to prison for conspiracy in connection with a plot to kill Morris Dees by bombing the SPLC office.

2000 – The SPLC wins a $6.3 million verdict against the Aryan Nations and its leader, Richard Butler. Butler must give up the 20-acre compound that is home to the nation’s most violent white supremacists. The SPLC filed suit after Aryan Nations members terrorized a mother and son.

2000 – Alabama prisoners are allowed to receive gift subscriptions to publications following the SPLC lawsuit, Prison Legal News, et al. v. Haley. Before the lawsuit, prisoners could not accept gift subscriptions and were forced to buy subscriptions from their prison trust accounts. The lawsuit also resulted in publishers receiving notification when their publications are rejected by the Alabama Department of Corrections.

2002 – Teaching Tolerance launches the first Mix It Up at Lunch Day. The program encourages students to break out of their comfort zones and meet other students.

2002 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules Alabama prisons cannot handcuff prisoners to metal posts known as hitching posts. The ruling in Hope v. Pelzer comes after the SPLC served as co-counsel for a prisoner handcuffed to a hitching post outdoors for seven hours.

2003 – Winning a lawsuit against Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to enforce the constitutional separation of church and state, the SPLC forces the removal of a three-ton Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building.

2004 – The SPLC creates the Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) to address the abuse and exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers. It files a number of lawsuits on behalf of immigrant workers, recovering nearly $2 million in wages within its first five years. It also brings reforms to the forestry industry, a major employer of immigrant labor.

2004 – A settlement in the SPLC suit Baker v. Campbell means that people incarcerated by the state of Alabama who are chronically sick — who had been routinely denied medical care — will get the care they need.

2005 – The SPLC wins an almost $1.5 million verdict in the Ranch Rescue case. A 70-acre paramilitary compound is awarded to immigrants who were detained and assaulted by a vigilante “border patrol.”

2005 – Two SPLC documentaries about the Civil Rights Movement are honored. Mighty Times: The Children’s March, wins an Academy Award for best short documentary. Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks, wins a daytime Emmy Award.

2005 – The Mississippi Youth Justice Project is launched to reform the state’s juvenile justice system. Mississippi ultimately passes legislation developed with the SPLC that radically overhauls the state’s juvenile justice system.

2006 – The SPLC exposes growing evidence that large numbers of potentially dangerous racial extremists are infiltrating the armed forces and urges the Pentagon to adopt a zero-tolerance policy for extremism. Forty members of Congress join the SPLC’s call for action.

2007 – The SPLC publishes Close to Slavery, a groundbreaking report detailing the systematic exploitation of guest workers by U.S. businesses and labor contractors.

2007 – A Texas jury awards $9 million to Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled Black man who was left with brain damage after he was knocked unconscious and dumped along a road by four white men in 2003. The SPLC filed the suit after the men received jail sentences of 30 to 60 days.

2007 – The SPLC assists the U.S. Justice Department in reopening civil rights era cold cases by providing the FBI with information about the deaths of dozens of people who may have been victims of racially motivated killings during the 1950s and 1960s.

2007 – The SPLC launches the School-to-Prison Reform Project. Based in New Orleans, the project seeks reforms to ensure students get educational services in school that are needed to prevent them from being pushed out of the classroom and into the juvenile justice system. Lawsuits filed by the project have spurred several school districts in Louisiana to implement new programs to help children with disabilities.

2008 – The state of Mississippi closes the notorious Columbia Training School, a prison for girls, seven months after the SPLC sues the state to stop the physical and sexual abuse of teenage girls confined there. The suit exposes brutal conditions, including the shackling of girls for weeks at a time. The state vows to decrease the incarceration of young people and provide quality services for at-risk youth.

2008 – The SPLC wins a $2.5 million verdict against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) for its role in the brutal beating of a teenager at a county fair in rural Kentucky. The verdict is expected to cripple the IKA, once one of the nation’s largest Klan groups.

2009 – A plea agreement is reached with five of the Black youths known as the “Jena Six.” The young men, initially charged with attempted murder for a high school fight involving a white student in Jena, Louisiana, avoid jail time after pleading no contest to misdemeanor simple battery charges. The SPLC represented one of the youths and helped coordinate the overall defense strategy.

2009 – The Palm Beach County, Florida, school system settles an SPLC complaint on behalf of students with disabilities who were not provided the counseling, social work and psychological services required by federal law. The agreement to protect these students is one of the largest settlements involving federal education law for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

2009 – The SPLC brings national attention to the plight of immigrants with Under Siege, a report detailing widespread discrimination against low-income Latinx people in the South. 

2009 – The SPLC reaches a settlement recovering $175,000 on behalf of 39 migrant workers who worked for months without pay as they repaired apartments in post-Katrina New Orleans.

2009 – The SPLC releases The Second Wave: Return of the Militias, a report documenting the powerful resurgence of antigovernment militias a decade after they virtually disappeared from view.

2009 – The SPLC reaches a settlement to correct unconstitutional conditions at the Harrison County [Mississippi] Juvenile Detention Center, where children were allegedly brutalized by staffers, held in filthy cells for 23 hours a day and provided no recreational or educational services.

2009 – The SPLC report Climate of Fear documents the fierce anti-immigrant climate in Suffolk County, New York, where Latinx people were routinely the target of violent attacks, harassment and abuse driven by an anti-immigrant atmosphere fostered by community leaders and law enforcement practices. The U.S. Department of Justice announces an investigation of “discriminatory policing” in Suffolk County.

2009 – An agreement is reached in Hinds County, Mississippi, where children at the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Detention Center suffered abuse and neglect. Children are no longer locked down for 23 hours a day or banned from having books in their cells.

2009 – The Pentagon tightens its policy banning extremist activity in the military following a series of investigative reports by the SPLC since 2006 that uncovered extremist activity among active-duty personnel.

2010 – Arkansas-based Superior Forestry Service Inc. agrees to pay $2.75 million to settle an SPLC lawsuit filed on behalf of guest workers who were allegedly systematically cheated out of their wages. The settlement is one of the largest of its kind.

2010 – A settlement agreement is reached in a federal lawsuit the SPLC filed against the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center in Mississippi. The settlement promises dramatic reforms at the facility. The lawsuit described children locked in cells for 23 hours a day and subjected to the use of pepper spray as punishment.

2010 – The town of Homer, Louisiana, settles an SPLC lawsuit filed on behalf of the widow of an elderly Black man shot to death by a white police officer in 2009.

2010 – In response to mounting reports of vicious anti-gay bullying and student suicides, Teaching Tolerance releases Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History. More than 30,000 copies of the documentary film and classroom teaching kit are ordered by educators within the first three months.

2010 – The SPLC wins a $250,000 settlement for Mexican immigrants who were jailed and turned over to immigration authorities after demanding pay withheld by their employer at a Tennessee cheese factory. The case established an important legal precedent for workers’ rights.

2010 – A North Carolina company agrees to pay $230,000 to settle an SPLC lawsuit on behalf of a Latina factory worker who claimed she was brutally assaulted by a plant manager after she had earlier reported his sexual harassment to company officials.

2010 – New Orleans schools agree to reform security policies to protect students from handcuffing and shackling after the SPLC sues on behalf of a first-grader who was handcuffed by an armed security officer.

2011 – A settlement agreement is reached in a federal lawsuit the SPLC filed on behalf of a Latino man who suffered broken bones in his face when he was arrested and beaten by police officers during a 2010 traffic stop in Smyrna, Georgia.

2011 – Teaching Tolerance releases Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education 2011, a report finding that most states fail at teaching students about the Civil Rights Movement.

2011 – The public school district in Durham, North Carolina, agrees to end discriminatory practices that created a hostile environment for Latinx students, following a federal civil rights complaint filed by the SPLC.

2011 – A settlement agreement is reached to pay $1.5 million to more than 1,500 foreign guest workers owed back wages by an Arkansas agricultural company. The agreement with Candy Brand is one of the largest settlement agreements ever reached against a single employer of foreign guest workers.

2011 – A settlement agreement is reached to improve conditions and stop abuses at Mississippi’s Forrest County Juvenile Detention Center. The facility, located in Hattiesburg, agrees to comply with federal law requiring that children at the center be allowed access to lawyers and civil rights advocates.

2012 –The Anoka-Hennepin School District, Minnesota’s largest, agrees to adopt a wide-ranging plan to protect LGBTQ+ students from bullying and harassment.

2012 – The SPLC reaches a settlement with Jackson [Mississippi] Public Schools to reform discipline policies and end the practice of handcuffing students to railings and poles for hours at a time as punishment for minor rule violations.

2012 – A federal court rules that colleges and universities in Florida can no longer charge out-of-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants who are residents of the state.

2012 – A federal court orders a Georgia forestry company to pay $11.8 million to 4,000 foreign guest workers who were systematically cheated out of their wages.

2012 – A jury orders a labor recruiting firm and its owner to pay $4.5 million to 350 Filipino teachers lured to teach in Louisiana public schools and forced into exploitive contracts.

2013 – The SPLC reaches agreement with Mobile [Alabama] County Public Schools to reduce suspensions for minor misbehavior and provide alternative forms of discipline.

2013 – The Jefferson Parish [Louisiana] Head Start program agrees to provide equal access to impoverished Latinx preschoolers who were previously denied enrollment.

2013 – Litigation over Georgia’s anti-immigrant law comes to an end after several key provisions are blocked by a coalition including the SPLC.

2013 – In an historic ruling, a federal court declares unconstitutional sections of a statute that prevented the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from granting benefits to a disabled veteran and her same-sex spouse.

2013 – Alabama’s vicious anti-immigrant law is gutted after the SPLC and other civil rights groups reach an agreement with the state to permanently block key provisions.

2014 – Major provisions of South Carolina’s anti-immigrant law are permanently blocked as part of a settlement agreement with a coalition including the SPLC.

2014 – The SPLC releases White Homicide Worldwide, a report showing that nearly 100 people were murdered by active users of the leading white supremacist web forum, Stormfront, over the previous five years.

2014 – The SPLC releases War in the West, describing how a standoff between federal agents and a Nevada rancher was a highly coordinated effort by far-right militiamen that subsequently energized volatile extremists.

2014 – A settlement with the city of Montgomery, Alabama, stops the jailing of indigent people who can’t pay traffic fines — closing the city’s modern-day version of debtors’ prison.

2014 – Teaching Tolerance releases a first-of-its-kind literacy curriculum — Perspectives for a Diverse America — to help teachers better engage diverse classrooms.

2015 – The SPLC wins a $14 million jury verdict for Indian guest workers who were defrauded in a labor-trafficking scheme engineered by a Gulf Coast marine services company and its agents. The verdict ultimately becomes part of a $20 million settlement on behalf of 200 workers.

2015 – Teaching Tolerance releases its eighth classroom documentary — Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot — prior to the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. Nearly 35,000 free copies are distributed in the first six months.

2015 – In a landmark victory, a jury finds that a New Jersey provider of “conversion therapy” violated the state’s consumer fraud law by offering services it claimed could turn gay people straight.

2015 – The Department of Justice, sparked by an SPLC investigation, reaches a settlement to stop the school system in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, from needlessly arresting children for minor school violations.

2015 – The SPLC brings international attention to the plight of incarcerated transgender people in a case brought on behalf of Ashley Diamond; the litigation leads to reforms to Georgia’s prison policies.

2016 – A judicial ethics complaint filed by the SPLC leads to the removal — for the second time — of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who violated his oath of office by ordering state officials to deny same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court.

2017 – Ruling in an SPLC lawsuit, a federal judge declares the mental health care system in Alabama prisons to be “horrendously inadequate” and orders state officials to reform the system while working in conjunction with the SPLC.

2017 – Mississippi agrees to reinstate more than 100,000 driver’s licenses that were suspended for non-payment of traffic tickets and will no longer suspend licenses for failure to pay fines, under an agreement with the SPLC.

2019 – A federal judge strikes down the Trump administration’s approval of Medicaid waiver projects in Kentucky and Arkansas that include work mandates and other cuts to health coverage.

2019 – A New Jersey state judge orders the dissolution of an organization known as the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA) that facilitated fraudulent gay-to-straight “conversion therapy.”

2019 – A federal judge orders that the publisher of a major neo-Nazi website must pay more than $14 million in damages to a Jewish woman targeted for a relentless barrage of antisemitic threats and messages by the neo-Nazi and his followers.