Since its founding in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center has faced serious threats. The storied civil rights institution's Montgomery, Ala., offices were firebombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1983. Its co-founder and primary fundraiser, attorney Morris Dees, was the target of numerous death threats. But perhaps none is as serious as the one it currently faces, from the Justice Department.
In late April, federal prosecutors announced an indictment against the organization, alleging criminal fraud. The Justice Department accuses the SPLC of misrepresenting the true nature of bank accounts it maintained to pay confidential informants. It also claims that the nonprofit defrauded its donors, by saying it was fighting extremism when it was, in fact, funding extremism through the payment and placement of informants with extremist groups.
The SPLC vigorously denies these allegations, saying it is "outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive."
But the federal government's indictment comes at a time when several former and current SPLC employees say the organization is already deeply vulnerable. Buffeted by years-long internal turmoil, and a transformed political landscape where extremist narratives have been mainstreamed, the SPLC's ability to stand against these accusations will be closely watched.
NPR spoke with three former SPLC employees for this story. Two current SPLC employees also spoke to NPR on condition that their names not be used because they are not authorized to speak for the organization.
"I'm rooting for [the SPLC]. I think that the current leadership at the SPLC is doing much better and they're on a much better track," said David Neiwert, a retired journalist who worked for the SPLC between 2013 and 2018. "But I think that they've got a long ways to go."
Internal disarray
For decades, the SPLC pinned its reputation on splashy court wins against extremists and their organizations. From the Klan to Aryan Nations and Tom Metzger, the so-called "godfather" of the neo-Nazi skinhead movement in the U.S., the SPLC demonstrated that hate groups could effectively be held accountable for civil rights violations and bankrupted out of business. These successes attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions, as well as talented young researchers and journalists who wanted to expose anti-democratic elements that targeted marginalized groups.
But under the hood, there had long been indications of problems at the organization.
In 2019, the SPLC fired Dees amid claims of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. It was the culmination of decades of reports and rumors of toxic internal dynamics, detailed as early as 1995 with plaudit-earning reporting from the Montgomery Advertiser. According to multiple current and former employees who spoke to NPR for this story, Dees's ouster marked the beginning of a new period of internal turmoil.
The SPLC's other co-founder, and president, resigned, along with its legal director. The organization brought in Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's former chief of staff, to conduct a workplace environment review. Staff unionized, in an effort to address what many felt were systemic biases against employees who were Black and women.
But the internal upheaval was affecting the SPLC's output, said former and current staffers.
"People were really having a hard time getting their work published. The publication process became extraordinarily slow," said Michael Edison Hayden, who was a senior investigative reporter at the SPLC. Another former senior investigative journalist, Jason Wilson, said he found the internal dynamics at the SPLC at the time to be "chaotic" and "disorganized."
"There was a lot of turmoil in middle management, as well. There wasn't a lot of stability," Wilson said. "Candidly, you know, there were morale problems. Arguably, I left because I had a morale problem."
Hayden said that ultimately, he left the organization after he was the target of what he claimed was discriminatory retaliation for having signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. He wrote about the experience in his recent book, Strange People on the Hill. In response to questions about this, the SPLC said "SPLC does not tolerate discrimination or retaliation in the workplace and denies Mr. Hayden's allegations. We do not comment on personnel matters."
Then, in 2024, management laid off dozens of SPLC employees in what it called a restructuring of the organization. The team working on immigration issues, in particular, was largely gutted – just at a moment when Donald Trump was rallying the GOP base around anti-immigrant conspiracy theories to win back the White House. The layoffs capped an impression that had been building for years among some employees, that the SPLC was moving away from the work that made it famous, to a top-heavy, risk-averse organization.
"SPLC went from this muckraking legal place to what is essentially a D.C. nonprofit that produces reports… and kind of does legal work," said one current employee who was not authorized to speak publicly about the organization.
Existential challenges
As these changes were taking place inside the SPLC, a transformation in American politics was also presenting the SPLC – and similar anti-extremism organizations – with an existential challenge. Far-right narratives, such as the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, went from fringe conspiracy theory to part of the GOP's official platform. Christian nationalism has become a powerful political force within the GOP. In one of his first acts after his second inauguration, President Trump pardoned people who were convicted for their role in the violent January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, including members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
"As of 2023, I could see all of these [extremist] groups don't matter anymore, and I could see the ideology [that] pushed the Trump administration into the White House was becoming mainstream," said the current employee. "And it also was becoming very obvious that you could no longer write something like, 'A guy said something racist on Twitter, let's get rid of him.' That era was over."
Wilson said the shift of fringe figures and ideology into the seat of power is something that the SPLC had not anticipated.
"For decades, [the SPLC] operated safe in the knowledge that these were kind of marginal groups that just needed to be kept on the margins," Wilson said. "And then when the dam broke, I think it was very, very hard to adjust."
This was also the case across the organizations that track and oppose extremism. Some, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the George Washington University Program on Extremism, began to spotlight left-wing extremism. But that work was less rigorous. A CSIS study was faulted for methodological problems. One of the study's authors, Daniel Byman, acknowledged in an interview with NPR last year that other analyses might use different, and legitimate, coding criteria to arrive at other conclusions.
A GWU study, about the supposed rise of left-wing militias, was published without an author's name on the report. NPR reached out to the university's Program on Extremism twice to request an interview with the author; it did not respond.
In other cases, organizations even removed research relating to far-right extremism from public view.
"The ADL just wiped their website of all the kind of information that used to be there about extremist groups," Wilson said, referencing news reports that found that the Anti-Defamation League had taken down its "Glossary of Extremism" in late 2025. "Some of which was quite, quite useful."
The ADL was unable to respond to NPR's queries about this by publication time.
"One of the biggest issues that the anti-extremism space faces is that it has really been consolidated around the administration now," said Hayden. "You have DHS sharing memes and things that you would typically see on extreme far-right Telegram."
The SPLC itself has not taken down research or shifted focus to the far left. Still, the current and former employees who spoke to NPR said that the organization simply failed to meet the moment when it was most needed. Hayden said that altogether, this has weakened resistance to the forces behind an "unprecedented" rate of democratic backsliding in the U.S.
"We've become atomized. It's become a sort of disorganized space," he said. "And I think that in a dark way, you almost have to hand it to MAGA in that they have effectively bullied these organizations so much that there isn't a great bulwark right now against radical right activism."
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