The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project is dedicated to monitoring hate groups and extremist activity in the U.S.
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Montgomery police guard the Center's office and the Civil Rights Memorial while white supremacists protest Center's work at a January 25, 2003 rally.
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It also publishes the Intelligence Report, a quarterly magazine updating law enforcement, the media, and the public on the activity it investigates.
The Project has also established law enforcement training to help officers identify and respond to hate crimes.
Originally called Klanwatch, the Intelligence Project was created in 1981 in response to an incident two years earlier. During a peaceful march in Decatur, Alabama, Klan members attacked civil rights activists. Curtis Robinson, a black man, shot a Klansman in self-defense. When Robinson was convicted of assault with intent to murder by an all-white jury, the Southern Poverty Law Center appealed his conviction and brought its first civil suit against the Klan.
During the suit, SPLC investigators discovered evidence suggesting a resurgence of Klan activity. Klanwatch was established to take action against the Klan – and the cross burnings, beatings, shootings, and other violence that authorities largely ignored.
Though the Project's original purpose was to gather information about the Klan, it evolved into much more. Today, the Project monitors hate crimes and domestic hate groups – including neo-Nazi, racist Skinheads, Christian Identity adherents, black separatists, and extremist militias – making it an acknowledged expert on the wide spectrum of U.S. hate activity.
Because the most violent hate groups monitored by the Intelligence Project are no longer associated with the Klan, the program's name changed in 1998 from Klanwatch to the Intelligence Project.
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Neo-Nazi leader Richard Butler was bankrupted by a Center lawsuit.
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Investigating hate leads to legal victories
Intelligence Project investigations have resulted in SPLC civil suits against many white supremacist groups for their roles in hate crimes. More than 40 individuals and nine major white supremacist organizations were toppled by SPLC suits in the Project's first 17 years.
One of the first important cases combating organized white supremacists that relied on the Project's investigative work was the Michael Donald lynching case in 1981. Nineteen-year-old Donald was on his way to the store when he was abducted, murdered, and hung from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama.
Intelligence Project investigators gathered evidence against the Klan killers, leading to murder convictions and to a civil suit that destroyed their organization, the United Klans of America.
Intelligence Project investigations also helped the SPLC legal team end a campaign of Klan terror against Vietnamese fishermen in Texas and disarm a paramilitary army of North Carolina Klansmen in 1986.
A 1988 case found two Klan groups – the Southern White Knights and the Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK – and 11 individuals liable for an attack on civil rights activists in Georgia, ordering nearly $1 million in damages. The Invisible Empire, once the nation's largest and most violent Klan group, was forced to disband and give up all its assets, including its name.
In November 1988, Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon, was beaten to death by a group of teenagers in a heinous racially motivated murder. Though the perpetrators pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison, Project investigators believed the Skinhead attackers were organized and influenced by Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance, an infamous neo-Nazi Skinhead group that recruited young people to form violent gangs.
Using information and evidence gathered by the Intelligence Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Metzger, resulting in a judgment of $12.5 million that left WAR in disarray and provided for the education of Seraw's son, Henok.
Rise of the 'Patriots'
In the 1990s, the Project noted the rise of the antigovernment "Patriot" movement and the militia groups it spawned. In 1994, a special Intelligence Project task force began monitoring this movement and its strategic links to white supremacist organizations. In a letter that year to then-Attorney General Janet Reno and attorneys general of six states, SPLC co-founder and chief trial counsel Morris Dees raised an alarm about extremists in the militia movement. Dees warned that the "mixture of armed groups and those who hate" was a "recipe for disaster."
In the aftermath of the tragic 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Intelligence Project investigators' thorough knowledge of the militia movement was put to use by law enforcement agencies and media. Dees later testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on terrorism, while another Project official appeared before the U.S. House regarding antigovernment terrorism.
Rise of the Report
What began as a Klanwatch newsletter has become the most prominent publication on extremism in the country. Today the Intelligence Report is an award-winning quarterly magazine reaching over 300,000 subscribers, including more than 60,000 law enforcement personnel.
Exposés by the Intelligence Report uncovered ties between the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and prominent politicians, including U.S. Senator Trent Lott. Other groundbreaking stories in the Intelligence Report's illustrious history include documenting the racist nature of neo-Confederate groups and the increasing international influence of David Duke.
Training law enforcement
In 1992, the Intelligence Project began a groundbreaking partnership with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) that culminated in new courses on hate and bias crimes
Courses are offered both online and in the classroom, and teach officers to recognize and respond to hate crimes. Academic and continuing education credit is granted by California State University, San Bernardino to officers who complete the online course.
Intelligence Project staff also offer in-person trainings on extremist activity to law enforcement and offer their expertise to educational and other groups.
Authority on U.S. extremism
Intelligence Project leaders, recognized as comprehensive and reliable sources of information on the extreme right, have been called upon by the government and the media. The Project's director testified before Congress in 1996 about far right extremists in the military, and the editor of the Intelligence Report presented a paper on Internet hate as a United Nations-certified expert to the U.N.'s High Commission on Human Rights in 2000.
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SPLC file photo shows Furrow, charged with shootings in Los Angeles, in an Aryan Nations security guard uniform.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence information on Buford Furrow was widely used in the media after he attacked a Jewish community center in Los Angeles in 1999. Within hours the Project identified Furrow as a former guard of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, and the U.S. News & World Report said the Project's work in the Buford case "bested the nation's mighty law enforcement agencies."
Though the number and affiliation of the groups it tracks has expanded, and though its methods have evolved into high-tech online tracking as well as solid fundamental investigative techniques, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project never tires in its mission to document the threat of extremism.
Through its tracking efforts, incisive reporting, and educational programs, the Intelligence Project is and will continue to be the nation's preeminent monitor and analyst of American extremism.
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