The SPLC today released a blueprint for reducing Louisiana's alarming student and teacher dropout rates as part of an ongoing effort to improve the state's schools. The state's high school dropout rate is among the worst in the country.

Immigrants have become the target of choice for many hate groups, and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the mainstream media isn't helping. Thanks to the newest teaching kit from the SPLC's Teaching Tolerance program, an estimated 2 million high school students saw a more accurate portrayal of America's immigrant history in the 2008-09 school year.

Five black youths accused of beating a white high school student in Jena, La., amid racial tension sparked by nooses hung on the high school campus, have pleaded no contest to misdemeanor simple battery charges as part of an agreement to resolve a case that sparked a massive civil rights protest on their behalf.

Children and teens at a Mississippi juvenile detention center will no longer be locked in cells all day without reason or forced to sleep on the floor in a squalid, overcrowded facility following an agreement the Southern Poverty Law Center has reached in a federal lawsuit.

SPLC attorneys in September filed a lawsuit seeking damages for Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled black man knocked unconscious and left on a roadside by four young white men.

A jury trial in the SPLC's lawsuit on behalf of Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled black man who was taunted, beaten and left unconscious beside a road by a group of young white men, will begin April 17 in Linden, Texas.

A Texas lawyer and his psychologist wife played key roles in the Center's successful pursuit of justice for Billy Ray Johnson, a black man with mental retardation who was ridiculed, assaulted and left for dead on a desolate country road by four young white men. The Center sued on his behalf, and on April 20, a jury awarded him $9 million.

A civil jury in Linden, Texas, today awarded approximately $9 million in damages to Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled black man who was taunted, knocked unconscious and dumped along a desolate road by four white men in September 2003.

Over the past couple of months, the trial team, led by Morris Dees, has been in Kentucky preparing for the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) case.