The Second Most Hated Man

Tooling along 1-65 in Alabama, headed for Montgomery, the driver of the green '68 Volkswagen checked the road in front of him, then glanced at the papers in his lap and occasionally leaned over to scribble on a yellow legal pad. After 2 1/2 hours on the road, Lawyer Morris Dees, 37, somehow arrived safely at his office. By then he had finished going over the transcript of Johnny Harris' trial.

The day before, Harris, 31, had been given the death penalty for murdering a prison guard during a 1974 riot at Alabama's horrendously overcrowded Atmore prison farm. The jury had not bought Defense Attorney Dees' argument that Harris was singled out because under Alabama law, a lifer who commits first-degree murder must be sentenced to death. Harris was the only lifer involved in the riot. The scribbling that Dees did during his frighteningly industrious drive back from the trial was an outline for Harris' appeal. It will argue that the verdict went against the weight of the evidence.

After a 24-hour weekend with Wife Maureene and their children, Dees was off again last week to Raleigh, N.C.--this time by plane. He was on his way to consult with attorneys working on the case of Joan Little, 20, who escaped from a jail in Washington, N.C., after stabbing the county jailer to death. Little claims that she was defending herself against rape, and Dees was helping to organize a search for evidence to bolster her argument. Many guards in the jail, he contends, regularly extorted sexual favors from women prisoners.

Hard Egg. Having set that inquiry in motion, Dees hurried over to Tarboro, N.C., where three young black men, known as the Tarboro Boys, are charged with the 1973 rape of a white woman, raising echoes of the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the '30s. The defendants claim that their victim consented; she denies it. Convicted and condemned to death, the three won a reversal on technical grounds. Last week they were supposed to face the same charges again, but the trial was postponed until next month.

Energy like Dees' expended on behalf of so many controversial black defendants explains the lawyer's reputation as "the second most hated man in the state." (No. 1 is Federal Judge Frank Johnson, 56, whose record of civil rights enforcement long ago won him eminence.) Dees has earned his ranking quickly: in January 1972, he was the principal founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest group that now has a $400,000 annual budget. In three years S.P.L.C. attorneys have been involved in court fights that ended the use of Alabama county lines as legislative-district boundaries (thus opening the way to victory for 17 black state legislators), forced the U.S. to stop funding the sterilization of welfare mothers and girls under 18, and integrated the Montgomery Y.M.C.A., a Louisiana cemetery, a Louisiana ambulance service and the Alabama state troopers.

Short-order success is nothing new for the Alabama-born lawyer. Dees has been an acquisitive competitor ever since he won childhood Easter-egg hunts by getting other kids to give him their eggs in return for a bite of the chocolate prize. During his undergraduate and law-school years at the University of Alabama, he and a partner parlayed a birthday-cake agency and other enterprises into a six-figure business. The two then put off practicing law to set up a marketing group that sold specialized cookbooks, among other things. It soon grew into one of the South's largest publishing houses and was sold to the Los Angeles Times in 1969 for $6 million. Dees was then 31.

Financially set, Dees turned to law and eventually the S.P.L.C. On the side, he used his direct-mail savvy to raise money for politicians, among them George McGovern, for whose 1972 campaign his mailings raked in $20 million. Dees plays as he works--swimming as if a shark were after him, riding with the recklessness of a professional rodeo cowboy, which he once was part-time. But the son of a white Alabama farmer reserves his greatest passion for the cause of the South's blacks.

"He's a poor boy who always worked hard and came to understand that poor blacks and poor whites face the same enemies," says Charles Morgan Jr., director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Friend and foe alike suspect that he has political ambitions, but Dees denies it. "The courts force everything," he says. "All the big issues are settled there." As he sees it, much is left to settle: "Today's attitude of the courts in the South is worse than it was in the pre-civil rights days when racism was wide open. Resentment has never stopped building since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and it's just now beginning to surface in its own horrid form." With his energy and abrasive self-confidence, Dees may not be able to end the resentment, but he figures he just might help keep it in check.

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