美国国家公共电台 NPR After Allegations Of Toxic Culture, Southern Poverty Law Center Tries To Move Forward（在线收听）

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

A well-known civil rights organization is trying to emerge from allegations of a toxic workplace culture that discriminates against women and people of color. The Southern Poverty Law Center fired its famous founder, Morris Dees, and its longtime president resigned. After that leadership shakeup, an African-American woman was appointed to run the organization. Interim president Karen Baynes-Dunning has spoken publicly about the path forward for the first time, and it was in an interview with our colleague, NPR's Debbie Elliott, who joins me on the line from Atlanta. Hi there, Deb.

DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Hello.

GREENE: So, Deb, this renowned civil rights organization facing these issues now within their own ranks - Karen Baynes-Dunning, who's going to be dealing with all of this - tell me more about her.

ELLIOTT: Well, she's a former juvenile court judge. And she had been on the Southern Poverty Law Center's board for a little over a year when her fellow board members selected her to be the interim president and CEO to try to steer the organization back on course.

GREENE: I mean, it sound like they've been entrenched. I mean, long-simmering complaints by workers - current, former - about alleged gender, racial discrimination, sexual harassment. I mean, what is she even thinking about in terms of confronting all this right now?

ELLIOTT: Well, she says the first thing she's trying to do is just clarify exactly what the issues are. She spent her first couple of weeks traveling around, meeting with staff to hear their concerns. So she's talking to people, finding out what was going on. She declined to talk about specific allegations, citing personnel policy, but generally acknowledges there is a lot of work ahead. Here's what she says.

KAREN BAYNES-DUNNING: We failed to be deliberate about focusing on these issues that we fight for every day inside the organization. And so any organization out there that is not deliberate oftentimes leads to issues around equity and fairness, and so that's what we're trying to uncover.

ELLIOTT: They've hired an outside consultant to analyze the workplace culture and make recommendations for change.

GREENE: And as you've been reporting on this - I mean, speaking to people who work there, have worked there in the past - I mean, what's really standing out to you?

ELLIOTT: This is an organization whose mission is social justice, yet it's wrestling internally with this lack of inclusion and a management structure that really concentrated power among a key group of white decision-makers. Here's what I heard from Dana Vickers Shelley. She is now executive director of the Maryland ACLU but was director of public affairs at the Southern Poverty Law Center from 2012 to 2014.

DANA VICKERS SHELLEY: While there might have been increased diversity over the years, there was still not equity, and there was still not inclusion. You can hire faces. You can say, look. We're diverse. But if the decisions are still being made by the white people in leadership, then you don't have inclusion.

ELLIOTT: Now Shelley says the SPLC's brand promise is broken.

GREENE: So she's suggesting that just by the mere fact of who is making the decisions, it can create an incredible credibility problem for an organization like this.

ELLIOTT: Right. And so Karen Baynes-Dunning says that's where she's got to start, is inside the organization, trying to figure out what's wrong and restore credibility with her workforce. She says that starts with acknowledging something went wrong.

BAYNES-DUNNING: I'm acknowledging the fact that we didn't pay attention to the internal culture. You know, as a woman of color, I realize that, in my own experience, we deal with micro-aggressions in the greater society every single day. When you come and work for an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, especially for people of color, women, you don't expect this organization to mirror what we see out in the greater society.

ELLIOTT: Now, certainly the turmoil at the SPLC comes amid this broader Me Too movement, right? And at a time when you've got a new generation of workers who demand equitable workplaces. But still, these were not brand-new issues. They had surfaced long ago. Back in the 1990s, the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, published a series of reports that exposed racial tensions within the organization and raised some questions about their aggressive fundraising tactics.

Now, Baynes-Dunning points out that their staff has grown exponentially in recent years and that the structures just were not in place to monitor these kinds of workplace issues. Top of her agenda will be to establish such a framework.

GREENE: Debbie, to what extent is the SPLC still tied to the legacy of its founder, Morris Dees, and where is he in all this?

ELLIOTT: Well, I tried to speak with Mr. Dees, and he did not return my repeated phone calls. But he has denied these allegations in other news outlets, in particular the sexual harassment claims. But, you know, there is a challenge here. The Southern Poverty Law Center, it's so entwined with Morris Dees. He's long been the face of the organization.

But Baynes-Dunning counters that the Southern Poverty Law Center is more than just one person and that that legacy, that work can continue, that it's the 360 staff members who make the impact that the organization has. She says her job now is to start lifting up those workers more and have their voices count.

GREENE: That's NPR's Debbie Elliott. Deb, thanks as always for your reporting here.

ELLIOTT: You're welcome.