SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER

KLANWATCH PROJECT

1001 South Hull Street
Montgomery. Alabama 36195

Dear Friend,

I hope you will take the enclosed police photograph very seriously.

The family of Marvin Davis will forever remember their visit to the Mobile, Alabama, morgue to identify his body. Only a few hours earlier, he had been laughing with friends and planning a happy future after graduation from junior college.

Members of the Mobile Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan had other plans for 19-year-old Marvin Davis. Even though these Klansmen had never met Marvin and had nothing against him personally, they kidnapped him at gunpoint from a city street as he was going to a convenience store.

The next morning, Marvin Davis's body was found hung by the neck from a tree in a black neighborhood.

A Klansman, James Knowles, confessed to being a part of this lynching. It was done, he said, “to show Klan strength in Alabama.” On December 10, 1983, a jury convicted one Klansmen for Marvin’s murder.

I watched this trial. Grown men in the audience openly wept as Marvin Davis’s confessed lyncher told how Marvin begged for his life while Klansmen prepared the noose for his neck. It was obvious to me and our investigators that many more Klansmen were involved in the conspiracy to lynch Marvin Davis than have been arrested.

If this recent Klan violence were just an isolated incident, we would not be nearly as concerned. But the lynching of Marvin Davis is just one of a series of modern day Klan attacks on blacks and Jews.

There is a new wave of violence sweeping the Deep South and it is being led by the Ku Klux Klan.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center’s KLANWATCH Project has taken the lead in bringing the Klan to justice.

To help find all the killers of Marvin Davis, we have filed

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a massive Federal civil rights suit against the nation’s most violent Klan group, the United Klans of America. This Klan faction has been found guilty of some of the most heinous Klan crimes of this century.

Members of the United Klans of America have a bloody record of violence, including:

Now, as admitted by Klansman James Knowles, we know that members of the United Klans lynched young Marvin Davis.

The enclosed Newsweek article dramatically illustrates how effective our work has been in tracking down Klansmen guilty of racial violence.

KLANWATCH lawyers and investigators obtained a Federal court injunction in 1982 stopping the Texas Klan from harassing Vietnamese fishermen from using Galveston Bay.

Working with the Texas Attorney General, we also obtained a court order in 1982 banning the Klan’s paramilitary army, the Texas Emergency Reserve.

In December, 1983, KLANWATCH lawyers obtained a similar court order halting the Invisible Empire’s Klan Special Forces from conducting paramilitary activities in Alabama.

And in May of 1984, we filed a Federal civil rights suit against the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to stop their harassment of innocent blacks and to disband their private Klan army.

The battles we have had, with the Klan in the past will be small compared to the fights ahead. The Klan is getting desperate as blacks gain political power in the South, and they will stop at nothing.

The massive voter registration drives planned by blacks in the Deep South will cause Klansmen to resort to the night riding tactics of the past. A lack church was burned by arsonists in Humphries County, Mississippi, just two days before the August

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1983 Democratic runoff.

We must keep our lawyers poised to help in stopping voting rights violations.

We must continue our legal representation of those like Roy Patterson, the decorated black Marine Sergeant we saved from the electric chair for killing two white Georgia law enforcement officers who maliciously attacked him and his family.

We must keep our Klan investigative in full force and continue publishing the KLANWATCH “Intelligence Report” for law enforcement agencies and the public media.

We must continue our KLANWATCH educational programs and distribute our academy-Award-nominated documentary film, The Klan: A Legacy of Hate in America, to schools and civic groups.

We are engaged in a tremendous amount of work, and we must have your help to continue.

That is why I hope I can count on you to send a contribution of at least $25 or more by Thursday or Friday of next week.

Last summer our offices were burned by arsonists, and Federal authorities believe they were Klansmen.

Every time we pick up a law book that was not destroyed in the blaze, the soot and darkened bindings remind us that we face an enemy who will stop at nothing to disrupt our work.

For the first time, we feel what the Freedom Riders must have felt when they rode into Birminghan in 1960 and were welcomed by a club-swinging mob of Klansmen.

As guards protect our homes and officers at night, we understand a little of the fear unprotected civil rights workers in the 1960s must have felt as bully Southern sheriffs and night riding Klansmen took the law into their own hands.

I was born in Alabama and I love the South. Our people are basically friendly and loving. You would feel at home with most of my neighbors. But I am ashamed of the small group of mean-spirited racists whose hatred of blacks and Jews has given our region a bad name.

Like Dr. King, we too have a dream.

Since the late 1960s we have fought a lonely and sometimes discouraging battle. I have come to realize that historic

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advances in human rights are not made by the masses but by the determined few dedicate their time and resources in hopes that some day all our brothers and sisters can walk proudly in the sunshine of justice.

I feel sure you share this dream with us and that you are not willing to sit idle while the gains in human rights are trampled by the Ku Klux Klan and their allies.

We hope you will send a tax-deductible gift of $25, $50 or whatever amount you can afford so we can carry on this vital work.

Please help us find and bring to justice all those responsible for the lynching of Marvin Davis.

Sincerely,
Morris Dees
Chief Trial Counsel