LDF Statement on the Investigation of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Read a PDF of our statement here.

U.S. Department of Justice officials announced yesterday that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, returned an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to fighting white supremacy and other forms of injustice.

In response, Legal Defense Fund (LDF) President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson issued the following statement:

"The Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the forefront of the fight against hate groups and violent white supremacist organizations for more than five decades, often at great risk. Such extremist groups are a scourge on our democracy. For years, the Department of Justice has recognized white supremacy as a fundamental threat to our national security. In 2020, former FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that 'the top threat we face from domestic violent extremists stems from those we now identify as racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists,' emphasizing that these extremists 'have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremism movements since 2001.'

"Despite this warning, the pervasive threats posed by racist violent extremists and hate groups, including their infiltration of law enforcement, persist. Reprehensibly, the Trump administration has not brought these groups to justice.

"LDF condemns in the strongest possible terms any effort to deploy government resources to target civil rights organizations committed to exposing white supremacy instead of trying to combat it. The federal government is duty bound to protect the rights and liberties of all people in the United States and not act as an instrument of intimidation. We stand in solidarity with SPLC and reject this apparent attempt to distract from this failure and other failures of this administration."

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Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation's first civil rights legal organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957, though it was founded under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall while he was at the NAACP. LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) is a division of LDF that undertakes innovative research and houses LDF's archive. In all media attributions, please refer to us as the Legal Defense Fund or LDF (do not include NAACP) and refer to the Institute as LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute or TMI.