The Southern Poverty Law Center is in the spotlight after the civil rights group announced Tuesday that it is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation because of its past use of paid informants.
The center previously used the informants to infiltrate extremist groups, and now faces possible charges over that practice, its CEO Bryan Fair said. The organization has faced credible threats of violence, Fair said, and the information gathered by informants helped saved lives. That information was also frequently shared with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, he said.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Here are some things to know about the Southern Poverty Law Center's history and controversies:
Alabama lawyer Morris Dees founded the organization in 1971, starting a civil rights-focused law practice for people who were poor or disenfranchised. At the time, federal laws and U.S. Supreme Court rulings designed to end Jim Crow-era segregation were still fairly new, and widespread resistance to desegregation persisted in the South.
People who faced continued discrimination often struggled to find attorneys who were willing to represent them in court; lawyers were reluctant to bring the first lawsuits to test the civil rights laws.
Dees and another attorney, Joe Levin, took on some of those cases, representing their clients for free. Some of those earliest cases resulted in the desegregation of recreational facilities, the integration of the Alabama state trooper force and other reforms, according to the center's website.
By the 1980s, the civil rights group was monitoring white supremacist organizations in the U.S. The effort, initially called “Klanwatch” and focused on the Ku Klux Klan, was later renamed the “Intelligence Project,” and expanded to include other extremist groups.
Many of the groups did not appreciate being called out, monitored and sometimes sued by the center. Members of the KKK tried to burn down the center's Montgomery offices on July 28, 1983, in retaliation for lawsuits filed against Klan groups.
The fire damaged the building, office equipment, the center's law library and files. More than a year later, three KKK members were arrested in connection with the blaze, and all three plead guilty and were sentenced to prison.
The center previously used paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities, often sharing it with local and federal law enforcement, Fair said. They were used to monitor threats of violence, he said, adding that the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
The nonprofit organization gets most of its funding from donor contributions, and those contributions have added up. Its endowment had just under $732 million in hand as of last October, according to the center.
The center's “Intelligence Project” has grown over the years, and the organization has faced criticism for some of the groups it has added to the tracker. Conservatives have said adding some groups unfairly maligns them because of their viewpoints. The conservative religious organization Focus on the Family was added in part because of its anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric, for instance.
That criticism escalated after the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college campus in Utah. That brought renewed attention to the center's inclusion of Kirk's group, Turning Point USA.
The center included a section on Turning Point in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
A month after Kirk's death, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the bureau would sever its relationship with the center, asserting that the organization had been turned into a “partisan smear machine” and criticizing it for its use of a “hate map.”
That move marked a dramatic rethinking of longstanding FBI partnerships with prominent civil rights groups.
Other nonprofit groups also have sent people undercover or used confidential informants to get information. For instance, the nonprofit conservative group Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.
The anti-abortion organization Center for Medical Progress was behind secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood executives in California. The videos were then edited in a way to falsely suggest that the executives were selling fetal remains. The videos triggered several investigations, and Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing but two of the activists with Center for Medical Progress were ultimately convicted of illegally recording someone without consent.
Fair says the organization began working with informants to monitor threats of violence during a time of increased risk, and the program was kept quiet to protect informants' safety.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
FILE - Family members of fallen civil rights activists view the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center during a private family viewing, Nov. 5, 1989, in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
FILE - Southern Poverty Law Center Director Morris Dees attends a news conference Nov. 18, 2002, at the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
