THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 24, 1997 TAG: 9701240539
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 63 lines
Morris Dees may be a legal wizard who strikes fear into the hearts of racists across America, but if you ask him how America's racial divide can be healed, he'll defer to Beulah Mae Donald.
Donald was a poor black woman in Dees' native Alabama who earned her living scrubbing white people's floors. After her only son, Michael, a college student, was lynched by two Ku Klux Klansmen, Dees' Southern Poverty Law Center took the Klan to court.
Dees held an audience of 550 spellbound Thursday night at Old Dominion University as he described the closing moments of that 1987 civil trial.
Dees had persuaded one of the Klansmen involved in the lynching to testify against the Klan. Just before the case went to the jury, the Klansman jumped to his feet and asked to speak.
``This young man walked over and stood in front of the jury and said, `You know, I learned prejudice, intolerance and hatred of black people at the knees of my family - my uncles, my daddy,' '' Dees said. `` `I was only 12 years old when I joined the Junior Klan. But now I'm so sorry for what I did.'
``And he looked over at Mrs. Donald sitting there less than 10 feet from him. His lips began to quiver and he began to sob. . . . He said, `Mrs. Donald, can you find it in your heart to forgive me for what I did to Michael?'
``She looked at him, rocked back in her chair . . . and said `I've already forgiven you.'
``This lady, who had lost one of the most precious things in her life, had the love in her heart to forgive,'' Dees said. ``She understood his pain. She understood it because her people and the people before her had suffered 300 years of slavery, Jim Crow laws and second-class citizenship. . . .
``She understood that this man was also a victim like she was.''
Until that moment, Dees said, ``I don't think I really understood the power of love.''
``I don't believe we're going to bridge that divide that separates us in this country along racial lines unless we learn to love one another,'' he said. ``I know that sounds simplistic, but I honestly believe that that is the only answer.''
Dees, whose appearance was part of the ODU President's Lecture Series, has achieved a national reputation for combating racists by hitting them in the pocketbook.
His Montgomery, Ala.-based center won a $7 million wrongful death judgment against the Klan in the Donald case, and three years later won $12.5 million from a skinhead group for the brutal slaying of an Ethiopian college student in Portland, Ore.
These days, the center stays busy tracking the activities of paramilitary militia groups and supplying schoolteachers with free instructional materials to help them teach tolerance and multicultural studies.
Dees, short and wiry with curly blond hair, speaks with a soft Deep South drawl. He is 60 but looks much younger.
The grandson of a Klansman, he was known as ``Bubba'' during his youth on an Alabama cotton farm but grew up to turn the tables on the racists around him. In his autobiography he tells how ``one of their own did them in.''
And by the way, he said, if there can be a happy ending to Beulah Mae Donald's tragic story, it is this:
``She ended up with the deed to the Klan's national headquarters.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Morris Dees