A Season for Justice: The Life and Times of Civil Rights Lawyer Morris Dees

In 1987 an all-white jury in a civil suit in Alabama found Ku Klux Klansmen guilty of murder and awarded $7 million to Beulah Mae Donald, a black woman whose son Michael had been their victim. Morris Dees, the prosecuting lawyer who engineered this landmark case, is cofounder of the Montgomery, Ala., Southern Poverty Law Center, an indefatigable foe of racism and a champion of civil rights. The grandson of a Klansman, gutsy, straight-talking Dees overcame ``a lifetime of indoctrination'' to spearhead such trailblazing cases as those involving the segregation of the Montgomery, Ala., YMCA and the exclusion of minorities from Southern juries. This electrifying, moving autobiography, written with Fiffer, a Chicago lawyer, is as notable for its tense courtroom dramas as for its intimate portrayal of a South in the throes of change. The book's close-up account of the ugly violence perpetrated by the Klan and other white-supremacist groups in the 1980s is shocking. Photos. BOMC alternate. (June)