A veteran civil rights activist warned Thursday that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indictment for its alleged informant scheme that secretly bankrolled leaders and members of hate groups is merely “the tip of the iceberg.”
Bob Woodson, an 89-year-old civil rights champion who faced jail time for his advocacy in the Jim Crow South, condemned the SPLC and admitted he wasn’t “surprised at all” that the non-profit allegedly funneled more than $3 million to “field sources” to infiltrate extremists groups between between 2014 and 2023.
“This is just a more obvious expression of the contradiction of people who say they are fighting for civil rights, and as a consequence, they are corrupt,” Woodson charged on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show.”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are people who are supposed to be fighting for civil rights.
“They ask which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable. So you get this kind of corruption that you’re witnessing,” the octogenarian declared.
Woodson founded the eponymous Woodson Center, a DC-based nonprofit that finances leaders in low-income areas to help “revitalize underserved communities,” according to its website.
His sobering remarks about corruption rearing its ugly head in supposedly righteous causes came a day after the Department of Justice indicted the SPLC for allegedly keeping its donors in the dark about the informant scheme.
The SPLC was charged with wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.
Many of the insiders getting paid by the SPLC were allegedly leading members of the hate groups, like an Imperial Wizard for the United Klans of America. None were formally identified in the 14-page indictment.
Attorney General Todd Blanche on Wednesday accused the SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
But SPLC CEO Bryan Fair has insisted the payments were for “confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
Curtis T. Hill Jr., the former attorney general for Indiana who now serves as an ambassador for Project 21’s black leadership network, told The Post that the SPLC should “be taken down brick by brick” if the DOJ’s allegations are true.
“The motive is raising money for self-perpetuation. Perpetrating hate costs money. If these allegations are proven true, they’re raising money to further their own existence,” Hill said.
Hill drew a line between law enforcement using informants to infiltrate hate groups versus civil rights advocacy groups.
“If you pay a few dollars to have advance notice of a cross burning, or you have an informant who’s going to tell you about a planned violent event, that’s one thing,” he noted.
“But we’re talking about hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars going to individuals who are involved in the process of planning the hate itself. That’s a different matter.”
“If they’re funding someone to actually go to Charlottesville and be an engaged participant, they’re perpetuating hate in the name of opposing hate. That’s the worst type of hypocrisy by a non-profit organization,” Woodson added.
The nonprofit allegedly paid $270,000 to one informant who helped organize the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Another source who fundraised for a neo-Nazi group was paid $1 million over eight years, as alleged in the indictment.
