Forty-eight years ago, SPLC founder Morris Dees stood at the Alabama Capitol at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the importance of the vote in democracy. In his view, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that contains extra voting rights protections that apply mainly to the South — is still necessary.

Responding to complaints of pervasive anti-LGBT harassment at the Moss Point School District in Mississippi, the SPLC today demanded that school officials act to protect LGBT students or face a federal lawsuit. 

A North Carolina school district’s recently announced plan to resolve a civil rights complaint is an important step toward protecting the rights of students and their families who speak little English, but the Southern Poverty Law Center and Legal Aid of North Carolina, which filed the complaint, are urging school officials to diligently enforce the plan to ensure success.

Oprima aquí para ver la versión en español del comunicado. (Click here to read the Spanish version of this news release.)

Though lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students are harassed at twice the rate of other students, a few purposeful steps can help transform a school into a safer place for all students, according to a guide released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project.

Poultry workers in Alabama often suffer significant injuries as they endure grueling, dangerous working conditions and frequent threats of deportation or firing, a problem that could grow worse under proposed new USDA regulations, according to a report by the SPLC and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

Poultry workers in Alabama often suffer significant injuries as they endure grueling, dangerous working conditions and frequent threats of deportation or firing, a problem that could grow worse under proposed new USDA regulations, according to a report by the SPLC and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

The SPLC’s annual census of extremist groups found that the number of far-right antigovernment groups has reached an all-time high, continuing powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures. The SPLC warned top federal law enforcement officials of the potential for domestic terrorism and urged the creation of a task force to assess the resources devoted to the threat.

The Southern Poverty Law Center today filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the Court to uphold a lower court’s ruling that Proposition 8 violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Proposition 8, or “Prop. 8”, is the 2008 ballot initiative that took away marriage for same-sex couples in California. The brief was filed in Hollingsworth v. Perry.

Alabama’s high poverty rate and lax regulatory environment make it a “paradise” for predatory lenders that intentionally trap the state’s poor in a cycle of high-interest, unaffordable debt, according to a new SPLC report that includes recommendations for reforming the small-dollar loan industry.  

The SPLC asked a federal court today to block a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that bars the federal government from providing veterans’ benefits to legally married same-sex couples.

 

In a motion for summary judgment, the SPLC urged the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to declare as unconstitutional Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act and two other statutes that prohibit the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

As Congress debates comprehensive immigration reform, lawmakers should not look to the current federal guestworker program – a program rife with labor and human rights violations – as a model for handling the future flow of low-wage foreign workers, according to an SPLC report released today.

 

Close to Slavery has been updated to include changes to the program during the past six years as well as new stories of the abuse that persists. Since its initial release, Close to Slavery has become the definitive assessment of the modern H-2 guestworker program.

Stacy Dawson, an openly gay junior at Scott County Central High School in Missouri, simply wants to attend the school prom this spring with his boyfriend. But his school, like many others across the country, prohibits same-sex couples from attending dances together. 

The SPLC today urged the school to rescind its policy, calling it an unconstitutional infringement on Dawson’s right to free expression under the First Amendment.

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal judge today to block a law requiring state officials to compile an online list of immigrants unable to prove they are not “unlawfully present aliens” – a state-sanctioned black list that not only violates federal law but could encourage harassment and violence against the state’s immigrants.

The Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal judge today to block a law requiring state officials to compile an online list of immigrants unable to prove they are not “unlawfully present aliens” – a state-sanctioned black list that not only violates federal law but could encourage harassment and violence against the state’s immigrants.

The state of Alabama may be a step closer to exonerating all of the Scottsboro Boys – nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women 80 years ago in a case that called the nation’s attention to the deadly racial injustice of the Jim Crow South.