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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.