Who's The Hate Group?
April 2, 2025
Dear Ms. Lunelle,
Approximately 10 years ago the students at Western Carolina Community College would invite Morris Dees, CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to a function as their guest speaker. Personally, I would have paid him no nevermind had he not called the Sons of Confederate Veterans a hate group.
On the day of that speech, I would don the uniform of the Southern Soldier just outside the Town of Sylva, North Carolina and make my way on foot some 4 miles to Western Carolina College. Stopping only on occasion to answer the many who would enquire as to where I was marching?
“To confront the Devil's Minion” would be my reply.
Upon arriving I would take the seat at the very front by the stage that the Honorable Camp Commander Mike Parrish of the Jackson Rangers # 1917 had saved for me.
Dees would begin by stating he had seen what he thought was a Black man don in the Confederate soldiers uniform heading this way.
I stood up and replied:
“It was I Mr. Dees, and since I have your attention I came here to ask of you why you and your organization call the Sons of Confederate Veterans a 501(c)3 non-profit Heritage Organization a hate group?
And being a ‘so-called’ Law Center why do you persist in calling the people of the former Southern Confederacy Insurrectionist and Traitors with no proof of that in a Court of Law?”
Dees would have the nerve and audacity to ask me to go behind closed doors later and take up my question in private.
“I will not, you made claim in front of all these students, their families and friends.”
The young Black woman who had introduced him in such glowing terms interrupted...”Yes Mr. Dees, why want you answer Mr. Edgerton's question out here in the open for all to hear?”
“I have prepared a Speech and don't want to deviate from it” was his reply. “This man has taken up enough of my time.”
“Never mind young lady,” I would interrupt; “if I leave here now,” I said looking at my watch, “I can make it back to Asheville in time to watch Star Trek.”
As I sat watching and listening to a Channel 6 ABC News interview of a one Margaret Haung, the Southern Poverty Law Center's replacement for disgraced
