Southern Poverty Law Center Received Millions of Taxpayer Dollars to Spread its Message and Materials, Including in Schools

The Department of Justice announced last month that the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, organization designed to confront “hate” in society, was being charged with wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The root of the crime?

A grand jury in Alabama returned an indictment on April 21 concluding there was enough evidence to go to trial on the following:

“Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America.”

In effect, the DOJ is alleging that the SPLC funneled money through dummy accounts to hate groups that spurred racial unrest, like the infamous Charlottesville Proud Boys event, only to turn around and decry the behavior.

By May 11, the Alabama Attorney General had followed up with a civil investigation into whether SPLC had used “deceptive fundraising practices under Alabama’s consumer protection statutes.” The nonprofit is based in Montgomery, Alabama.

The alleged behavior would put quite a stain on SPLC’s stated mission of “creating a world where Black and Brown communities are represented and respected by our democracy.” Its website highlights “dismantling white supremacy” as a priority.

We opened the books on the group, which had designated Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA a hate group prior to his murder, to find out whether any public dollars had flowed to SPLC.

Since 2016, at least $3.85 million has gone to the nonprofit, either as direct payments, or indirectly to help spread their teaching materials in America’s public-school classrooms.

BY THE NUMBERS

Since FY 2016, at least $1,352,655.07 worth of taxpayer funds have been paid directly to SPLC from school districts, states, cities, counties, universities and other public entities. Most of the 63 reported payments lack an explanation, but the relatively small amounts suggest payment for materials, speakers or licensing fees.

While some units of government might seem more predictable than others (e.g. New York City), payments came from a range of places across the ideological spectrum from New Jersey to Florida and from Michigan to Kansas.

Incoming public revenue for SPLC peaked in FY 2021 thanks in part to Fulton County, Georgia. That county made the largest set of payments on August 6: three separate payments of $30,000; $6,262.00; and $3,019.37 for a total of $39,281.47. None of the payments include an explanation.

Several examples do include explanations, though. A $5,500 payment from Robbinsville Public Schools in New Jersey includes “Title Iv - Pur Prof Svcs,” a common abbreviation for “Title IV - Purchased Professional Services.”

Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act of 1965 (updated by the Every Student Succeeds Act) provides grants to K-12 schools for a range of academic enhancement purposes. Section A includes professional teacher trainings from outside experts (for “student support and academic enrichment”), while Part B includes hired instructors and after-school programs.

Another $4,000 payment from Chicago Public School District 299 includes the note, “For Credit Classes, Seminars, Workshops, Etc.” Again it indicates SPLC was spreading its materials and message in K-12 classrooms.

In two other cases, public entities reimbursed travel for a speaker from SPLC. Kansas State University paid $642.70 for “Honorariums Reimburse Travel” and the Judicial Conference of Ohio paid $550.14 for “Supplies & Maintenance : Comm Transport Reimbursement To/from Site (out-of-state).”

But perhaps most troubling are two payments marked for “Teaching Tolerance.” Cincinnati Public Schools paid $2,000 for “Teaching Tolerance Facilitatin” [sic] in February 2020. Penfield Central School District (a suburb of Rochester, NY) paid $4,000 for “Mou Teaching Tolerance” in July 2019. An MOU refers to a “Memorandum of Understanding” to deliver services.

Open the Books had previously uncovered a multimillion-dollar grant to a public university that involved injecting SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” curriculum into half a dozen K-12 schools in Michigan. We dove into the details of the research and the radical curriculum itself.

Download the data.

TEACHING TOLERANCE

Our research team profiled a grant worth $2.5 million called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE)” in our recent report, “Transparency Crisis,” which detailed the murky world of overhead spending that accompanies every research grant.

The grant in question came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and describes creating an after-school curriculum based on radical SPLC “Learning for Justice” materials. Looking past the project’s incredibly on-the-nose acronym (YES-ERACE) describing its aim to erase racial injustice, we reported:

One of the only avenues researchers can pursue to ascertain the overhead rate for a given project is through filing a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) for the proposal and progress reports of target research.

Open the Books requested such documents from HHS subagency National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor project called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE).” The federal grant for this project was $2.5 million.

The project integrated “the Teaching Tolerance curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center” into an existing local middle school program called Youth Empowerment Solutions. UM-Ann Arbor researchers said they would use a “group-randomized trial design in the summer programs across 6 middle schools” and “examine the effects of the curriculum on individual youths’ sense of empowerment, racist behaviors, and violent behavior.”

The “efficacy of the YES-ERACE” program would be tested “in a randomized design on empowered outcomes which will mediate the effects of YES-ERACE on perpetration of racist attitudes and behavior” and on a “model that predicts empowered outcomes will mediate perpetration of racism, and that YES-ERACE effects on aggressive and violent behavior will also be mediated by reducing perpetration of racism over time.” The curriculum included lessons on “white supremacy,” “media stereotypes,” “LBGTQ appreciation,” and “solidarity.”

Documents produced through FOIA state the researchers obtained the standard on-campus overhead rate the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor commands: 56%, or $1,173,910.

The grant proposal went into tremendous detail on its direct costs, which include:

• $3,400 for computers “to develop curriculum documents, manage...data, and communicate with partners, research staff, and faculty.”

• $15,000 for supplies like copier and printer paper, clipboards, folders, and envelopes, along with swag for youth participants.

• $512,500 to pay participating schools to implement the project.

• $5,000 for “anti-racism and cultural equity ‘train the trainer’ for staff and faculty” with “experts in the Teaching Tolerance curriculum.”

• $48,000 for consulting from an expert in “racism [and] racial identity and adolescence.”

• $16,000 for an advisory board “with expertise in the Teaching Tolerance curriculum, health equity and anti-racism training.”

Given that direct costs cover computers and office supplies (which are not particularly expensive, as outlined above), it is unclear how this project can justify over $1 million in overhead costs, except for the fact that it is automatically mandated by law.

Open the Books received these documents roughly ten weeks after submitting the public records request. However, the federal agencies already have this data. Simply making it publicly accessible will go a long way toward improving transparency and trust in scientific spending.

Universities, which have suffered reputational blows from hard-left campus activism and programmatic activities in recent years, could additionally volunteer to release data on overhead flows and amounts to regain the trust that taxpayer dollars are being put to good use.

According to the grant profile on USASpending, the YES-ERACE project is still active and receiving federal funds.

Read the original documents from the FOIA request here:

• YES-ERACE Award Application

• YES-ERACE Award Notice

• YES-ERACE Progress Reports

DIFFERENT NAME, SAME RACIAL GAME

Shortly after being awarded, the “YES-ERACE” moniker got a significant touchup and became “YES-IDEAS.”

We gave our findings to Daily Signal editor and resident SPLC expert Tyler O’Neil to investigate further. He was told by NIH that the agency had cancelled this grant in March 2025 and moved the funding elsewhere.

Further investigation shows a different story.

The same Principal Investigator for the original grant, Marc Zimmerman of UM-Ann Arbor, had a new project funded in December 2025, called YES: Innovative Discussion for Engagement, Achievement and Service (YES-IDEAS).

While the words making up the acronym changed, the premise is the same: the researchers are developing a new curriculum to be used in Genesee County middle school after school programs. Any mention of SPLC has been removed, but observers have the right to be suspicious about the ideology driving Zimmerman’s “research” motivations.

Zimmerman receives millions of dollars in grants related to youth violence prevention and uses various DEI-related phrases and words in previous grants (like, for example this $1,000,000 one award in September 2025 Prevention Research Center of Michigan: Transforming the Built Environment to create Safe and Equitable Spaces for Physical Activity). He is published research oeuvre is replete with woke premises like, for example, this paper co-authored in 2025: “Understanding the Intersectionality of COVID-19 Racism, Mental Distress, Alcohol Use, and Firearm Purchase Behavior Among Asian Americans.”

Why is this person still getting millions of dollars in grants? Why has he been allowed to simply change out the words in one of his projects to erase reference to DEI, and still get funding for what is likely essentially the same project?

THE YES PROGRAM

You can read more about Zimmerman’s intent with the broader YES project here, including community development at UM-Ann Arbor’s own website:

Youth empowerment activities include workshops for program planning, budgeting, implementation, and evaluation; opportunities to engage peers in community change efforts; developing ethnic identity and pride; and working with adults to achieve these goals.

At UM-Ann Arbor’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, you can read more about the YES-IDEAS concept, including its goals of “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Appreciation and Solidarity.”

CONCLUSION

Open the Books only came upon the details of “Teaching Tolerance” and the SPLC curriculum by submitting a FOIA request and waiting ten weeks. That suggests there could be plenty more indirect support for the nonprofit that’s not readily visible to taxpayers.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that’s true. A second FOIA related to our investigation of the Pentagon’s K-12 public schools turned up SPLC, too. In our report on the radical ideology that had taken hold in the school system, we reported that free resources used in teacher training or classrooms, like the radical SPLC content, can be even more problematic because they do not show up in spending data and don’t have reporting requirements.

For example, one free resource recommended multiple times during a professional development summit was SPLC’s “Let’s Talk!” handbook, which teachers are supposed to use to make children have “uncomfortable conversations” about race, power, and privilege.

We also dove into College and Career Readiness Standards, which were launched in 2015 to ensure students have the same curriculum no matter where in the world they are going to school. The standards were rolled out slowly over the years, with the last standard, elementary social studies, being introduced in the 2021-2022 school year.

Multiple teachers discussed how learning standards have been, or could be, highjacked to encourage children to become social justice. [Find details in Appendix A of the report].

A DoDEA middle school teacher noted in a presentation called “Integrating Global Citizenship Education and Social Justice Standards” that SPLC’s resources aligned with the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework DoDEA uses to teach history and social studies:

“The Learning for Justice website [a project of SPLC] provides numerous resources available to you. One of these resources is the Social Justice Standards. They provide a roadmap to develop anti-bias education for every grade level and focus on four domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action...The lessons offered on this website provide strategies that align with our C3 standards for different grade levels. I have personally completed many of these lessons offered.”

In short, taxpayers have spent millions on spreading SPLC’s rhetoric and pedagogical materials. While the numbers may not be enormous, the costs are both real and intangible and students are offered messaging about racial solidarity, white supremacy and DEI.

It’s cost a minimum of $3.85 million since 2017, but anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers are higher, and that the intangible costs will spread much further.