Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 by the civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. and is based at 400 Washington Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama. The IRS record (EIN 63-0598743) carries an August 1971 ruling date. For the 2023 tax year the organization reported total revenue of $169.9 million and total assets of$749.1 million.

SPLC describes itself as “a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.”

The annual count and the Hate Map

SPLC’s most widely circulated product is The Year in Hate & Extremism, an annual report enumerating hate and antigovernment groups operating in the United States. The 2025 edition, subtitled From Extreme to Establishment, documented 1,263 such groups.

The accompanying Hate Map is an interactive tool that lets users see the groups listed in a given state, compare states by groups per capita, track how counts have changed over time, and filter by category.

Relevance to digital political discourse

SPLC publishes its extremism research online as a set of named, continuously updated resources — the Hate Map, the Extremist Files, the Hatewatch blog and a case docket — rather than only as periodic reports. The 2025 edition of its annual report is framed around what SPLC describes as the hard right’s movement into government and the private technology sector, and includes a section on the year of the hard-right influencer.