As judicial fights get tougher, Southern Poverty Law Center looks to advocacy training

The headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama on February 8, 2023. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Alabama office is developing a program to train people in the state to advocate for issues within their communities.

Up to 15 participants will be selected for an Advocacy Institute that will offer lessons for those supporting change at the local level, community organizing and connecting people with tools, resources, and partners they will need to be successful. Participants will meet one weekend each month from June to September.

The state offices of the civil rights organization focus on organizing and advocacy instead of the litigation against discriminatory rules and laws that SPLC has traditionally pursued.

Tafeni English-Relf, director of the Alabama state office of the SPLC, said the organization modified its mission slightly to focus more of its efforts on the southern part of the country.

“We actually started out as a civil rights organization in response to civil rights legislation and the passage of those laws,” she said. “And we really wanted to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement was a reality specifically for people living in the southern states, and really living under the remnants of Jim Crow.”

SPLC has been establishing state offices in other states for several years. English-Relf was hired in spring 2023 to lead the state office model for Alabama, which focuses on local matters, especially in the rural areas of the state.

English-Relf said that SPLC has advocated for issues throughout its history, but not “in this direct way.”

The move comes as the organization is facing more struggles advancing its goals through the judiciary. In an interview last year, Margaret Huang, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said it is facing more headwinds now in the courts.

“The intention here is to recognize that we are not seeing the opportunities to defend civil rights in the judiciary anymore,” Huang said at the time. “Instead, what we are seeing is the opportunity to engage with communities, and to build political influence on behalf of communities that don’t have a lot of influence at the moment, so that they can advocate for their needs and priorities to local city government or with state government.”

The SPLC sued a Ku Klux Klan group into bankruptcy in the late 1980s, and has been active in litigation over immigration, prison conditions and LGBTQ+ issues.

The organization retains significant resources. SPLC reported revenues of $169.8 million between Nov. 1, 2022 and Oct. 31, 2023; expenses of $122.1 million and assets of over $711 million. But the rightward shift of much of the federal judiciary, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, has posed new challenges.

“There are social scientists who study this and managed to quantify this,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at NYU. “All of their studies suggest what we are all observing anyways, which is, by and large, the court is moving significantly to the right. We may have the most conservative court in history.”

Friedman said that courts have shifted back and forth in political ideologies, but the shift to the right started in the 1960s when the focus for selecting judges became based on ideology and not necessarily geography.

“If you compare the number of years that we had a Republican president, and the number of appointments they got,” Friedman said. “You will see that Republicans have gotten a lot of appointments, and that partly explains the court that we have.”

The justices, along with judges down the line, have had an impact.

“What we are seeing is an expansion of this legal theory that race neutrality is engendered in even foundational anti-discriminatory documents,” Devon Ombres, senior director for courts and legal policy for the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “It is being picked up by these right-wing business interests to scrape back a lot of the gains that have been given and prevent the advancement of people of color by saying advancing the interests of people of color is discriminatory against white people.”

It is unclear which spheres this legal theory will apply, be it criminal justice or other social justice issues, according to Ombres, because the process remains ongoing. It has reached race-based admissions.

SPLC partnered with Alabama Arise, who will provide training for the institute to lay the groundwork for advocacy and organizing. The curriculum will also feature leadership and development and inform people about how data can drive their advocacy efforts, English-Relf said.

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