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Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said in a statement Friday he has asked the board of the troubled organization to "to immediately launch a search for an interim president in order to give the organization the best chance to heal," and took responsibility for problems that have swept out the senior leadership of the group in just a week.
Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center, speaks as the Southern Poverty Law Center holds a press conference to update the status of their lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections, dealing with the medical and mental health needs of inmates, on the steps of the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday February 8, 2019. (Photo: Mickey Welsh / Advertiser)
Cohen, who has worked at the SPLC since 1986 and served as president since 2003, said in the statement that "we'll emerge stronger" after an audit of the organization's practices by Tina Tchen, a former White House official and Chicago-based lawyer.
"Given my long tenure as the SPLC president, however, I do not think I should be involved in that process beyond cooperating with Tina, her team, and the board in any way that may be helpful," the statement said. "Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them."
When reached for comment on Friday evening, an SPLC spokesperson said the center cannot comment on the specifics of individual personnel decisions.
Cohen's statement follow's last week termination of SPLC co-founder Morris Dees. Cohen last week said Dees failed to adhere to the organization's "values," hinting broadly at misconduct. The Los Angeles Times reported the resignation of an assistant legal director in recent weeks over race and gender equity concerns may have acted as a catalyst for Dees' removal.
On Thursday, Rhonda Brownstein, SPLC legal director and a member of its senior leadership staff, also resigned, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to the Advertiser.
The center has grown from a three-man legal organization to a mammoth, $450-million advocacy organization with offices across the Southeast.
Since Dees' termination, the Advertiser has reached out to more than a dozen current or former center employees. The majority either did not return comment or declined to speak, but four former employees agreed to outline their experiences to an Advertiser reporter.
All four employees requested anonymity due to the center's sterling reputation in the progressive nonprofit and political realms, where all continue to work.
Several of the employees described high staff turnover and a "toxic" workplace riddled with conflicting priorities and inter-office politics.
All four independently spoke of racial equity concerns in senior leadership, describing a disproportionate amount of people of color serving in entry-level administrative positions compared to the rest of the workforce. Two former employees said they were disconcerted by what they viewed as sluggish responses to high-profile cases of deadly police force in recent years, as well as prioritization of marketing and fundraising over on-the-ground civil rights work.
A review of the center's 2019 board and senior staff reveals that senior leadership at SPLC remains largely white.
Dees had weathered criticism for decades, with a 1994 Montgomery Advertiser series citing concerns about racial discrimination against back employees. Staffers at the time “accused Morris Dees, the center’s driving force, of being a racist and black employees have ‘felt threatened and banded together.’” Dees strenuously denied the accusation at the time.
Critics of the center in recent years have drawn attention to SPLC's behemoth fundraising mechanism.
"His obsession has really been with fundraising," said Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
"And the fundraising really promotes him. It’s brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars. It’s enabled him in some ways to overcome whatever bad press he got. When you’re sending out mail to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them don’t live in Alabama. The bad press just didn’t compare to the fundraising appeals. Morris is a genius of fundraising solicitations. He’s the king of junk mail. He did it better than anybody else."
Bright, a longtime critic of Dees, said the SPLC continues to do good work but, "If you have $430 million, do you really need people to give you more money at that point?"
Dees personally raked in nearly $5.7 million in compensation since 2001 according to a review of publicly available tax documents.
Over the years, the SPLC has continued to amass massive funds from donors amid differing levels of scrutiny. The nonprofit has hundreds of employees and offices in four states.
Its $450-millon coffers easily dwarf other civil rights groups — such as the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP — during the same time frame. The Montgomery-based EJI had about $57 million in net assets at that time and the NAACP had about $3.8 million.
Cohen in the statement called it an "incredible honor" to serve. According to a biography on the SPLC website, Cohen joined the center as legal director in 1986 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. He was later promoted to vice president of SPLC programs before he was named as president in 2003.
"I hope everyone participates in the transformational process that Tina will be leading with an open heart and an open mind," the statement said. "And I hope that everyone will let the process play out before jumping to conclusions. We can’t be calling for a review and simultaneously casting blame before that review is complete."
The German family that holds majority stakes in food brands including Einstein Bros. Bagels, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Panera Bread had close financial ties to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, a German newspaper reported.
- Germany's second-richest family, which owns stakes in Krispy Kreme, Panera and other food brands through a company called JAB Holdings, acknowledged links to the Nazi Third Reich.
- During World War II, JAB forced French prisoners of war and Russian civilians to work in the company's factories.
- JAB plans to donate $11 million to charity to help make up for its Nazi past.
Privately-held JAB Holdings, founded by the Reimann family in 1828, forced French prisoners of war and Russian civilians to work in its factories during World War II, according to the Bild tabloid. Forced labor was also used in private villas belonging to the family, which today owns 90 percent of JAB. Albert Reinmann Sr. and his son were avowed backers of Adolph Hitler, and Reimann Sr. helped finance the paramilitary SS force as early as 1933, the report said.
Both "have passed away, but they actually belong in prison," Peter Harf, a manager partner at JAB and spokesperson for the family, told Bild.
Donation to Charity
The company does not dispute the newspaper's findings and plans to donate about $11 million to charity as a result of learning about its past, Harf told the paper.
A majority shareholder in beauty products company Coty, JAB has also acquired brands including Peet's Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Keurig Green Mountain, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Intelligentsia. It purchased Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, which operates three national bagel chains, in 2014.
The Reimann family is worth an estimated $37 billion and is thought to be Germany's second-richest family. It has commissioned a historian to write a report on the family's ties to the Nazis, Harf said.
Other companies have had similar reckonings. Volkswagen, for instance, used concentration camp internees and prisoners of war as forced labor its its factories during the war, and its CEO recently apologized for using a Nazi slogan "work sets you free" at a company event.
Southerners who rose to federal office after the Civil War achieved something the Confederate Army had not: They seized control of Washington and bent it to their will. The Washington National Cathedral illuminated the era of white supremacist domination this month when it dismantled ornate stained-glass windows that portrayed the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as saintly figures.
The windows, installed in 1953, contained the Confederate flag and were the handiwork of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an activist group of well-heeled Southern ladies that was at the height of its influence in the early 20th century, when it raised prodigious amounts for monuments.
The clergy at the National Cathedral began to see the windows differently two years ago, after the white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, S.C. The victims were still being buried when the Very Rev. Gary Hall — then the cathedral’s dean — preached a moving sermon calling for the windows to be dismantled because they celebrated “a cause whose primary reason for being was thepreservation and extension of slavery in America.”
Mr. Hall repeated a common misunderstanding when he suggested that the U.D.C. had been a relatively harmless group that was “mainly concerned with fostering respect for Southern heritage.” In truth, the organization did more to advance white supremacist ideology during the first several decades of the 20th century than any other organization in American history.
Its leaders glorified the Ku Klux Klan. They romanticized slavery as a benevolent institution that featured happy, faithful and well-fed bondsmen and women. They spoon-fed these values to the young through racist primers and essay competitions that rewarded children for parroting white supremacist views. This distorted version of history nurtured a generation of well-known segregationists and formed the basis of Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.
The white supremacist agenda pushed by the U.D.C. was ascendant in Washington when the Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. Wilson promptly filled his administration with segregationists who worked diligently to segregate as much of the work force as they could. Highly paid black workers were driven out or confined to lower-paying jobs, undercutting the nascent black middle class. Many black workers were barred from offices, bathrooms and lunch tables that they once had shared with white co-workers.
The officially sanctioned segregation that took root during the Wilson era deepened under President Warren Harding, whose Southern-born commissioner of public buildings and grounds segregated even the tennis courts near the Washington Monument. The dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 was staged as a Jim Crow event, with black dignitaries banished to a weed-strewn Negro-only seating section where they were roped off from whites and guarded by Marines.
By this time, the ever-resourceful U.D.C. was campaigning to have “mammy monuments’’ — depicting the enslaved black women who had cared for the master’s children — erected in every state. A year after the Lincoln dedication, the Senate voted to appropriate a huge sum to be spent on such a monstrosity in the capital, on Massachusetts Avenue near Sheridan Circle. Mercifully, the bill failed in the House.
As the Yale historian David Blight has written about the episode, “The nation was only narrowly spared the ironic spectacle of unveiling a major memorial to faithful slaves on a prominent avenue in Washington only one year after the dedication of the temple of freedom and union the country has known ever since as the Lincoln Memorial.”
In 1931, some U.D.C. members set out to colonize the most visible house of worship in the country. At one point it suggested memorials for Generals Lee and Jackson, as well as for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Finally, in 1953, the cathedral settled on the stained-glass design with Lee and Jackson.
As it turns out, the cathedral dean who presided over the installation was Francis B. Sayre Jr., an early supporter of the civil rights movement and a grandson of Woodrow Wilson, whose tomb rests in the Cathedral. As Mr. Hall said after the Charleston massacre, neither he nor the church could live, as Mr. Sayre did, with the contradiction of supporting both the civil rights movement and a memorial to men who fought to preserve chattel slavery. The windows had to go.
PHOENIX, Arizona -- A 20-year-old man was arrested in connection with the murder of a 10-year-old Arizona girl who was shot and killed in an apparent road rage incident.
Phoenix police said Joshua Gonzalez was booked Thursday on one count of first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated assault.
Investigators identified him as the suspect in the death of Summerbell Brown, who was shot while she slept in the back seat of her family's car.
Gonzalez allegedly opened fire on Summerbell and her family after following them home. Surveillance video shows him driving a white Ford pickup truck, following the Brown family's black car, which was driven by her father, Dharquintium Brown. Her mother, Taniesha Brown, and sister were also in the car.
Police said when the family pulled into their driveway, Gonzalez opened fire on their vehicle before taking off. Summerbell and her father were both shot. Her mother and her sister were not injured.
"He was ready to start shooting. I got out of my vehicle and I asked him 'What's going on? What's up?' because he stopped at my house and I asked him 'What's up?' He just got firing, and he shot my car, and he shot me right here, and he shot up my house and he killed my daughter," Dharquintium Brown told ABC15.
"I looked at him dead in the face. He had this deranged look like he was high on something. His pupils were dilated. As soon as I looked at him in his eyes, he just, boom-boom-boom-boom through the car. He didn't even put the gun outside the window. He shot through his door," said Taniesha Brown, Summerbell's mother.
Summerbell and her father were transported to the hospital in extremely critical condition. Summerbell later died at the hospital.
"This is heartbreaking, and I'm going to miss her. I think about her every day. The memory is going to replay in my head every day. I can't sleep. I hope she's at peace. I just really hope she's at peace," Taniesha Brown said.
The 10-year-old girl was a straight-A student who loved dancing and gymnastics.
"She was just a baby. There was no reason for her to be taken like this," Taniesha Brown said.
Dharquintium Brown was treated and released from the hosptial. He is expected to the OK.
Thanks to a tip, police located the truck involved in the incident at a home in the 6200-block of West Fairmount Street on Thursday. Phoenix police, working with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, recovered the weapon used in the murder from inside the home.
Phoenix Police Sgt. Vince Lewis said Gonzalez has an extensive criminal history.
"Violence and so forth were part of the criminal history. That's what I can share," Lewis said. "It was the tips and the evidence that brought our attention to him on the day that we located him."
Police said they were investigating whether this all started because of road rage.
"It's possible that it could've begun on the roadway just by virtue of the fact that the car was following the other so closely before they arrived," Phoenix police Sgt. Vince Lewis said.
Phoenix officials say there's no indication of a spike in road rage cases, but police urge drivers to call them if tensions are escalating on the road so that officers can help.
"Get to a safe location and if you can't, and you have the ability to make a phone call, go ahead and call Phoenix Police or call 911. Let them know that you're being followed by an aggressive driver," Lewis said.
A white Louisiana man is charged with a hate crime after allegedly running down an interracial couple.
News outlets report Jefferson Parish Sheriff's deputies say 50-year-old James Descant holds "disdain" for mixed couples.
Deputies say the black man and white woman were standing outside a business in Metairie when Descant swerved to hit them.
The man managed to jump out of the way but his girlfriend was struck by Descant's car, suffering injuries to her hip, wrist and foot.
The man told deputies that Descant had used a racist slur to describe their relationship and threatened to kill him before the attack.
Descant was arrested April 17 on charges including a hate crime and aggravated assault. He's also wanted by Kenner police. It's unclear if he has a lawyer.
Annette Kennealy, 51, was founded with multiple wounds to the body on her land in Limpopo province. Colonel Moatshe Ngoepe, a police spokesman, said: “Family members tried to call her without success, until one of them went to investigate. “On arrival he found the deceased inside the house.”
The victim was staying with an employee on her farm in the town of Louis Trichardt when she was attacked.
A friend is said to have found her body lying in a pool of blood.
Ian Cameron, head of the Community Safety division of AfriForum, a group that represents the rights of the white Afrikaner minority, said Ms Kennealy had been attacked with a hammer and iron rod.
Ms Kennealy was a former councillor with the opposition Democratic Alliance party.
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South Africa: Annette Kennealy was outspoken against attacks to the country's farmers (Image: FACEBOOK )
She was outspoken about farm murders. In her last Facebook post, she shared a link claiming that ten farm attacks, including one murder, had been reported in four days.
Police spokesman Col Moatshe said a 40-year-old man had been arrested.
He added: “The suspect will appear before the Louis Trichardt Magistrate Court soon.”
Attacks against South Africa’s white farmers are on the rise with some victims being tortured with electric drills, blowtorches and bleach, according to reports.
Research by Afriforum, a group which champions the rights of the country’s Afrikaner minority, released earlier this year said assaults on the farms shot up 25 percent last year.
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South Africa: Annette Kennealy was a former councillor with the opposition Democratic Alliance party (Image: FACEBOOK )
And it warned the attacks against landowners were becoming increasingly brutal.
Afriforum spokesman Ernst Roets said there was a “racial element” to the violence with research showing only white farming families suffered such levels of savagery.