White Civil Rights Attorney Aims to Understand Racist Adversaries : Activism: A settlement that bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan put him on the bigots’ hit list. But Morris Dees says he won’t die for anyone’s cause.

Black and white. Usually, it means plain, explicit, uncomplicated.

In his law office, where the white pages of statute books were blackened by a firebomb, Morris Dees somehow keeps seeing shades of gray.

Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its chief counsel in trials that have destroyed Ku Klux Klan organizations, wants to understand his bitter adversaries--even the ones who have tried to kill him.

“A lot of these people have paranoid personalities bred from, basically, family problems when they were children,” he said. “They’re looking for love and affection.”

“If you look at a klan roster, just about everybody . . . can be an exalted something. It makes them feel important.”

White supremacists chafe at such cool analysis, and at least three racist groups have Dees’ name at or near the top of their hit lists. On display in his office are charred law books and a melted clock, reminders of the firebombing in 1983.

In a case set for trial this month in Portland, Ore., the 53-year-old white Alabama lawyer is suing the White Aryan Resistance, alleging that members of the organization incited skinheads to fatally beat an African man there.

A lawsuit Dees brought in 1984, over the lynching of a black teen-ager in Mobile, Ala., resulted in a judgment that left the United Klans of America bankrupt. The victim’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, received title to the klan’s national headquarters property.

Dees pursued that case with zeal--and yet he wept, along with others, when one of the killers stood up at the end of the trial and begged Donald’s forgiveness.

“I just think, once you come face to face with this person you stalk, and their families . . . that’s a catharsis that a lot of people go through,” he said.

Morris Dees, blond-haired and blue-eyed, was reared in Alabama cotton country.

To explain the origins of the righteous anger that seems to underpin the law center, he tells a story from his youth.

He was 16 and his father sent him to accompany a tractor driver on the farm, a black man named Clarence, to a court appearance. Clarence had been charged with drunk driving, but Dees believed his story, that: “His car had a tie rod come loose and he’d hit a concrete median and knocked himself dizzy.”

The justice of the peace operated out of a store. During the “trial,” Dees said, “he never quit serving crackers and cheese and Cokes across the counter.”

Guilty was the inevitable ruling.

“The fine was over $100. Clarence didn’t have that kind of money,” Dees said. “I don’t know, that kind of set me on wanting to become a lawyer.”

Dees was graduated from the University of Alabama and its law school. As a student he set up a lucrative birthday cake delivery service and later sold books by direct mail. He and a partner sold the business, reportedly for $6 million.

Dees next put his direct-mail skills to work raising millions of dollars for Democrat George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, then used the campaign’s mailing lists to appeal for help with his own project, the fledgling Southern Poverty Law Center.

The center grew out of Dees’ “determination that there was an enormous gap in legal defense in certain kinds of cases,” said Julian Bond, the black civil rights leader from Georgia who became the center’s first board chairman.

What drives Morris Dees? “A very well-developed sense of outrage,” said Bond, now a professor and broadcaster in Washington, D. C.

“He knows the legal system can be used to right wrongs.”

The law center, which now has an endowment of $30 million and a $4-million annual budget, has taken on death penalty, voting rights, employment discrimination and other kinds of cases. It is best known for hauling the klan and similar groups into court.

Klanwatch, a handful of investigators at the Montgomery law center that is supported by informants around the country, produces a bimonthly “Intelligence Report” on racist activities that is sent to 4,000 police agencies.

White robes reflected by a fiery cross, the fear reflected on black faces in the night. In the “Intelligence Report” these stark images are reduced to column upon column of statistics, names and dates. Black and white becomes gray again.

“It appears to be good, solid information,” said Lt. Robert McCulley of the Memphis, Tenn., police. “Information is hard to come by. You don’t go into a bookstore and walk to the section labeled ‘Terrorism.’ ”

To enter the Southern Poverty Law Center, a visitor climbs steps walled with stone past a granite monument to civil rights martyrs. The front door is unlocked electronically and, inside, a receptionist mans a video security monitor.

“It’s a necessary bunker,” Bond said. “If you do this work from the safety of New York City, it’s one thing, but if you’re right in the heart of the beast, a sensible person takes precautions.”

And so Dees does. He varies his route and schedule to and from work. He avoids alleys.

“Demon Dees!” Louis Beam, a Texas neo-Nazi, once shouted while being questioned in one case. Beam challenged Dees to a duel.

Exorcising the demon with a simple gunshot apparently was not enough for the members of The Order who murdered Denver talk show moderator Alan Berg.

“The preliminary plan called for kidnaping Dees, interrogating him, then flaying him--peeling his skin off his body--before killing him,” wrote Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt in their book, “The Silent Brotherhood.”

The only profanity in an otherwise even-toned interview came when the soft-spoken Dees was asked whether he didn’t expect that one day his name would be on the law center memorial.

“Man, I don’t want to be a martyr to anybody’s (expletive) cause!” he said. “I didn’t get into this thing for a cause.”

The law center began by pressing a variety of suits: challenging unhealthful working conditions in textile plants, representing death row inmates and others.

Dees first went up against the white supremacists in 1979, when he represented a black marcher attacked during a peaceful demonstration in Decatur, Ala. The man was clubbed by KKK counterdemonstrators and tried to defend himself with a registered gun, Dees said. An all-white jury had convicted him.

Dees thought back to Clarence and his day in court: “Nothing had really changed.”

But something was about to. He filed a civil lawsuit against the klansmen.

Evidence uncovered by Klanwatch led to federal indictments of 10 klansmen. The suit ended in a settlement that, among other things, required the whites to attend a race-relations class. The class was taught earlier this year by the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who is black.

“One of the klansmen,” Dees said, “the day of the demonstration, he had a club in his hand. . . . Eleven years later, he’s standing there holding hands with Dr. Lowery in a prayer.

“And saying: ‘Maybe I was misguided back then, and we could have solved our problems in a different way.’ ”