Board member says League of the South is no 'hate group'

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"They have done that by creating bogeymen and trying to turn white Southerners against black Southerners," Lourie Salley, a Lexington attorney who is a member of the League's board of directors, said at a press conference in front of The Greenville News.

"The South Carolina League of the South and the League of the South in general is not, and I repeat not, a quote-unquote hate group," he said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which expects to raise more than $20 million this year for litigation, education and monitoring of what it calls hate groups, said Saturday it stands behind its position that the League is a neo-Confederate hate group.

"I think it's odd that the League of the South's defense of its own racist positions is to attack us," said Richard Cohen, president of the Law Center. "Regardless of what you think of us, I think it's pretty obvious that the League is a race-based group."

Cohen said the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the League a "hate group" based on information published on the League's Web site and other Internet postings by the group's members.

Morris Dees, his law partner Joseph J. Levin Jr., and civil rights activist Julian Bond founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971, according to the center.

The News reported earlier this month that four Republican candidates for County Council attended and received contributions from a fund-raiser hosted by a group led by the local chairman of the League of the South. The newspaper reported that a second group, the Election 2004 Committee, actually collected the contributions at the fund-raiser and distributed money to the candidates.

Salley said the League's view of the South is one of conservative, traditional values but not of the inequality between races that was part of that heritage.

"Nobody wants to return to a time when blacks or anyone else were second-class citizens," he said.