The Southern Poverty Law Center is stepping in to defend a grant program for black-owned small businesses after a white business owner sued Progressive Insurance, alleging racial discrimination.
Left-wing groups, including the SPLC, filed an amicus brief supporting Hello Alice, a platform delivering grants to black entrepreneurs, and Progressive. Progressive and Hello Alice jointly awarded 10 grants of up to $25,000 each to black-owned small businesses in August, enabling them to purchase commercial vehicles.
Freedom Truck Dispatch owner Nathan Roberts filed a class-action lawsuit against Progressive that same month, calling the grant program “patently unlawful racial discrimination” and noting that he and others would consider applying for the grants if Progressive did not limit it to black recipients.
America First Legal, a nonprofit founded by one of former President Donald Trump’s senior advisers, Stephen Miller, is representing Roberts in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Ohio, where Progressive is based. Roberts claims the grant program violates 42 U.S. Code Section 1981, which bars discrimination on the basis of race when making and enforcing contracts. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 created the statute in question, which states that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every state and territory to make and enforce contracts … as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
Last week, the SPLC, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the pro bono law firm Crowell Moring LLP filed an amicus brief supporting Progressive and Hello Alice. Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Hispanic National Bar Association signed on to the brief, as well.
“At a time when systemic racism continues to pervade the venture capital industry, Stephen Miller’s latest legal crusade is a transparent ploy to fundraise at the expense of black entrepreneurs simply trying to grow their small businesses,” Katy Youker, director of the Economic Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee, said in a statement.
“This litigation is nothing more than an attack on the efforts to undo our country’s legacy of extreme economic inequality along racial lines, and it is as dangerous to black entrepreneurs as it is antithetical to the goals of racial justice embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1866,” Leslie Faith Jones, senior staff attorney at the SPLC, said in a statement. “We will not simply watch as agents for change are discouraged from building a more equitable society—we will continue working to achieve the promise of civil rights for all.”
America First Legal condemned the SPLC’s legal brief, claiming that it “ignores” the law’s text and decades of Supreme Court precedents.
“Federal nondiscrimination laws protect all Americans, regardless of race or color,” Reed D. Rubinstein, AFL senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations, told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “This is settled law. Yet, in its racist zeal, the Southern Poverty Law Center ignores statutory text and passes over decades of controlling Supreme Court authorities without analysis or comment.”
America First Legal cited McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail, a 1976 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Section 1981 “prohibits racial discrimination in private employment against white persons upon the same standards as racial discrimination against nonwhites.”
“Given the SPLC’s well-documented struggles with the truth, these omissions are, perhaps, unsurprising,” Rubinstein added. “But they are instructive nonetheless, demonstrating just how far this organization is prepared to go to advance its immoral racialist agenda.”
The SPLC brief does not reckon with the basic text of the law, instead focusing on Congress’ intent. The brief claims that Congress “aimed to empower black citizens to gain the economic power they were deprived of following centuries of anti-black discrimination and the aftermath of slavery, and was never intended to serve as a vehicle to cut back private, remedial measures that serve to further black economic opportunity.”
The brief argues that the law does not apply to “private philanthropy,” citing Doe v. Kamehameha, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision from 2006.
The SPLC brief claims—in a footnote—that “America First Legal touts a track record of litigation it has filed seeking to dismantle remedial measures that benefit black Americans.” America First Legal says its legal efforts have fought racial discrimination.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions, ruling that “affirmative action” violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
As for struggles with the truth, Rubinstein was referring to widespread criticism that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups” and “antigovernment groups,” putting them on a hate map with Ku Klux Klan chapters.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced criticism from the Right and from the Left, and a former employee said the “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam” to scare donors into ponying up cash.
In 2018, the SPLC publicly apologized to a Muslim reformer, Maajid Nawaz, for having branded him an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Nawaz received more than $3 million in a defamation settlement. The immigration group the Dustin Inman Society is currently suing for defamation after the SPLC branded it a “hate group.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
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