Southern Legal Resource Center

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The Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC) is a non-profit foundation which offers legal support to victims of discrimination or other averse actions related to Southern Heritage.

[edit] History

The SLRC was founded in 1998 by a group of four attorneys: Carl A. Barrington (deceased), Kirk Lyons, Larry Norman, and Lourie A. Salley, III. Lyons was appointed Chief Trial Counsel, a position he still holds, and Salley became the firm's first Board Chairman. The organization is a registered South Carolina corporation with its executive offices in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

The SLRC scored an early victory in 1999 when it successfully sued a Greenville, South Carolina, private academy on behalf of Dr. Winston McCuen, a teacher at the school who had been fired for refusing to remove a Confederate flag that was part of a classroom historical display. The SLRC also undertook cases on behalf of Federal Aeronautics Administration workers in Florida, utility company employees in South Carolina and workers at a DuPont plant in Virginia (the "DuPont Seven"). Its most significant victory to date has been Castorina V. Madison County Schools, in which a Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2000 overturned a lower court's ruling in favor of a Kentucky school board's ban on student displays of Confederate symbols. In 2006 the Castorina decision led to an out-of-court damages award for Jacqueline Duty, an SLRC client who had sued her own school board after she was barred from attending her high school prom in a Confederate flag-patterned evening gown.

It has drawn extensive fire from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has frequently attacked the SLRC by citing Lyons' pre-SLRC defense of some controversial right-wing figures such as Aryan Nations members and Tom Metzger.^[1] In addition the SPLC has called Southern Legal's fundraising practices deceitful citing, for example, "the SLRC Web site detailed two disputes under a headline that read "Cases Pending," implying that the SLRC represented the parties involved. In both cases, the plaintiff's families say Lyons actually did very little for them."^[2]

The SPLC also criticized Lyons tie to Deborah Davila's FBI espionage case.^[3]

In 2004 the SLRC hired advertising executive and Southern activist Roger McCredie as its full-time Executive Director. Under McCredie the organization doubled the size of its Board of Directors, increased its advertising program and undertook an ambitious five-year growth and development plan.^{[citation needed]}