Morris Dees grew up the son of white Alabama cotton farmers. His father was hated by the local Klan because of the fair and kind way he treated other black sharecroppers. In the 1950s, Dees went to the University of Alabama and witnessed the mob violence that followed Autherine Lucy, the first black student who tried to integrate the campus.

"Rocks and bottles thrown at her and nobody wanted to protect her," Dees said. "I began for the first time to really think seriously about what all this meant."

In 1971, Dees would open the Southern Poverty Law Center, which fought for justice using civil rights litigation and has since become an internationally recognized center that uses research, education and the law to oppose bigotry and hate-group violence.

Morris Dees

Morris Dees

Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.

David Cook

David Cook

Photo by Ashlee Culverhouse /Times Free Press.

Dees comes to Chattanooga as the keynote speaker at tonight's eighth annual First Amendment dinner at the Jewish Cultural Center. He and I spoke over the phone last week, days before South Carolina removed the Confederate flag its capitol grounds. What follows is an excerpt of our interview.

Are you surprised that the Confederate flag has come down so quickly in the South?

Yes and no. It's only really been Alabama and South Carolina where the flag had already been taken off the dome of the capitol and was just sitting out in the front yard. The motivation is economic in both places. When Mercedes-Benz came in to Alabama, that company didn't want it on the capitol of the dome. Our governor took it down, saying he didn't want any distractions in seeking industry in Alabama.

The Chamber of Commerce and business leaders in South Carolina are pushing there.

It still remains in the Mississippi flag and monuments all over the South. Some honor Nathan Bedford Forrest. Schools are named after Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis. Alabama has a Confederate flag on its car tags. The city of Montgomery has a Confederate flag as part of its flag. There are hundreds of these streets named after Robert E. Lee. It's not just a couple of Confederate flags.

We are launching a project to catalog all these things and call attention to these state-sanctioned reminders of the Confederacy.

Why do Southerners embrace the flag?

We lost the Civil War. This is something we can do to keep our pride up, yet it's a misplaced symbol of pride.

The myth is the South fought the Civil War for states' rights and to protect the South from being invaded. The vice president of the Confederate States said in his cornerstone speech that the Civil War was to preserve slavery and blacks were inferior to whites and intended to be slaves. That was the quote, right out of his mouth. But the people who promote the flag don't want to read that.

Removing these government-sponsored symbols will hopefully further isolate those individuals who want to identify themselves that way.

What is the state of radical American extremism today?

There have been more deaths by domestic extremists since 9/11 than by any foreign terrorists.

The Internet is a virtual hate group with several hundred hate websites. If you don't know how to find a local skinhead group or Klan, you can get on the web and find information that those groups promote. And you do it in the anonymity of your own house. That's dangerous. Dylann Roof is a perfect example. His manifesto? We think he just cut-and-pasted the stuff from other hate websites, because we see that language everywhere.

He wasn't just some little nut in South Carolina. He was connected, digitally, with people all over the U.S. And to a lot of people, he's a hero. Because he's locked up in jail, they call him a prisoner of war.

Where does such extremism originate? Does it ebb and flow?

It's because of a changing America.

When I was picking cotton, people of color made up less than 18 percent of America. Today it's 37 percent. In 25 years or less, America will be a majority people of color.

That creates enormous fear in some people. And it angers them.

It causes everything from a gridlocked Congress to Fox News, which is essentially a mouthpiece for anti-immigrant America.

This isn't just a Southern thing. The night Obama was elected, some people burned a black church in Springfield, Mass. We've got a map on our website that shows how hate groups are distributed across the country. They're concentrated more in the Southeast, but they're all over the country.

The basis of my talk Tuesday is asking how we can all get along in a changing America. How do we keep the dream alive of a blessed community? How can we move forward as a nation and understand that diversity is a real blessing to this country?

Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.