SPLC lists league as hate group

To the editor:

The Jackson Board of Aldermen may want to know that the League of the South, which is asking the board to display a Confederate battle flag in the city cemetery, is listed as a white supremacist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The league displays clear antipathy to blacks. Its president, Michael Hill, has stated publicly that the group is against interracial marriage and that slavery is "God-ordained." The league would like the South to secede and its new league-led government to establish "European cultural hegemony" in the region.

Perhaps more troubling than its ideology is the league's willingness to keep as one of its Florida leaders Michael Tubbs, a man who stole munitions and weapons from military installations in the early 1990s with the intention of using them to attack black and Jewish targets. When Tubbs' background was made public late last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the league refused to remove him from the group.

Dr. HEIDI BEIRICH, Deputy Director, Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Ala.