On March 14, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the left-liberal civil rights nonprofit group known for its conspicuous wealth and ever-expanding lists of right-wing “hate” figures and organizations, abruptly fired 82-year-old Morris Dees. Dees, an Alabama lawyer, is the man who founded the SPLC in Montgomery in 1971 and built it into a fundraising powerhouse with assets approaching $500 million. Not long after his departure, President Richard Cohen and legal director Rhonda Brownstein, both of whom have been at the center since 1986, resigned.

The SPLC hasn't said much about the three departures, especially that of Dees, whose profile, though not photos, it scrubbed from its website. News media reported allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination that had circulated on in-house emails. New female members ofnationalists, and, most recently, Donald Trump supporters. Its collapse was, perhaps, inevitable. A March 21 article in the New Yorker by former SPLC staffer Bob Moser described it as “in many respects, a highly profitable scam” that pulled in tens of millions of dollars annually but did little in the way of actual poverty law.

Dees, born in 1936 to a farm family in Tucker, Ala., demonstrated an early knack for mixing high-minded activism with cementing a comfortable lifestyle for himself and those associated with him. His 1991 autobiography, A Season for Justice, described “the pulls and tugs of my conscience” to fight for civil rights. Except that, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, Dees spent most of his time growing a direct-mail