Police converged on The Union Thursday, prepared for a possible attack on a civil rights leader who spoke there that night.
The leader, Morris Dees, was the keynote speaker for Black History month. Dees came to fame for co-founding the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal center in Montgomery, Ala., that has waged lawsuits against civil rights violators for more than 30 years.
Dees has been criticized by such groups as the League of the South, which was on campus Thursday passing out fliers against Dees for having what they consider an anti-Christian agenda.
Dees said such groups are fringe groups, still upset that the South lost the Civil War.
Only one member of the League of the South stood outside passing out fliers at 6 p.m. Thursday, but police weren’t taking chances. Dozens of members of the MSU Police Department, Starkville Police Department, Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Department and undercover security officers patrolled inside and outside The Union, blocking off a street near the building and walking through the bathrooms and food court.
Dees spent about an hour in the M-Club building Thursday afternoon talking with student leaders about the state of the South, his experiences in Alabama during the most volatile days of the Civil Rights movement and current politics.
Dees said the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go.
“I think Dr. King would be very pleased. That doesn’t mean he’d be totally satisfied,” Dees said.
The civil rights struggle has changed, Dees said, since the 1960s when he watched Martin Luther King Jr. march in Birmingham in front of 25,000 people, when people openly-and violently-opposed things like school desegregation.
There was no public outcry when Edgar Ray Killen was indicted by the State of Mississippi in January, he said. Instead, it’s the built-in biases and prejudices that people today harbor that impede civil rights the most, he said.
“A lot of it’s unconscious,” he said. “You might call it white privilege, so to speak. People feel in some ways that they have an entitlement and are not willing to give up that entitlement.”
Dees said he thinks the country needs more progressive leadership. He criticized president Bush for invading Iraq under false pretenses and allowing such legislation as the Patriot Act to be passed.
Student Association secretary Donna Maykowski said Dees had a calming effect on the audience during his afternoon question and answer session. “I thought he was brave and truthful,” she said.
Matthew Robinson, a member of the League of the South, said he was passing out flyers disputing Dees’ good intentions because he and his organization believe Dees exploits minorities for money.
Dees claimed the League of the South believes it is “God-ordained that African Americans be taken care of by Anglos.”
However, Robinson claimed his organization is in no way a racist group.
“We’re an organization that is working toward the peaceful secession of the South from the federal government,” Robinson said. We believe that the American empire is beyond repair-morally and politically.”