The Southern Poverty Law Center has announced its next president and CEO amid a federal indictment into alleged fraud regarding payments to members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ryan P. Haygood, who serves as president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, will formally join the SPLC in August, the center announced Tuesday.
“I am humbled and honored to join the SPLC’s incredible team and stellar board at this pivotal moment,” Haygood said.
Here are five things to know about Haygood and the SPLC.
1. What Is the SPLC?
The SPLC gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but today, it puts mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on a “hate map” with Klan chapters.
The SPLC also faces federal charges for allegedly funding the very hatred it claims it exists to oppose. The SPLC allegedly reimbursed Klan members for a cross-burning and paid an organizer of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The SPLC admits that it paid members of white supremacist groups, but claimed those payments were part of an informant program that opposes the groups.
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The indictment makes sense because the SPLC exaggerates how hateful America is to raise money on combating that hate.
In addition to publishing the “hate map,” the SPLC runs an education program called “Learning for Justice.” The program has repeatedly defended critical race theory (a lens of viewing history that teaches students to deconstruct American society on the premise that it is systemically racist), while the “hate map” attacks the theory’s opponents.
2. Critical Race Theory Proponent
Haygood has repeatedly advocated for the claim that America is still systemically racist, despite the civil rights movement’s progress.
In 2021, he described the mission of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice as “to topple load-bearing walls of structural inequality” using “cutting-edge racial justice advocacy to build reparative systems that create wealth, transform justice and harness democratic power.” He claimed the COVID-19 pandemic “exposed the pre-existing and deeply embedded cracks of structural racism” in New Jersey’s foundation.
In February 2024, he claimed that the $300,000 racial wealth gap in New Jersey “reflects something inherently wrong with the system in which we operate, going back to slavery, which shaped every aspect of our founding and every aspect of our present-day reality.”
3. Reparations
Under Haygood’s leadership, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice created the New Jersey Reparations Council.
The council published a report in June 2025 calling not just for direct payments to black people, but also comprehensive policy change.
“[B]ecause slavery harmed both enslaved and free Black people, and because segregation and institutional racism have harmed descendants of enslaved people as well as Black people who arrived in New Jersey well after slavery, all Black people in New Jersey are eligible for reparations,” the report states. It claims that “the only way to close the racial wealth gap” is “through direct payments to Black individuals … in tandem with transformational policies that change systems.”
These “policy remedies” include: a government entity to oversee reparations; reforms to expand “democracy” such as lowering the voting age to 16 years old for non-federal elections; passing a constitutional amendment “guaranteeing a right to full employment”; increasing the minimum wage; creating programs to prioritize hiring racial minorities in medicine; cutting carbon emissions on the basis that highways were historically constructed to go through black neighborhoods so “vehicles pose a greater threat to the health of Black communities”; establishing a government-created legal defense fund to institutionalize lawsuits against “polluters”; and shifting funds away from police and toward “non-law enforcement, multidisciplinary response teams.”
4. Opposing Voter ID
Before joining the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, Haygood served as deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund.
According to his institute profile, Haygood “led LDF’s successful challenge to Texas’ racially discriminatory photo ID law,” which Haygood argued was an “unconstitutional poll tax.”
In 2011, Texas passed Senate Bill 14, which requires all in-person voters in the Lone Star State to present a valid photo ID when voting. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder objected to the law, claiming that it violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because it would disproportionately affect black voters.
While a federal district court upheld Holder’s objection, the Supreme Court later ruled in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that the formula for Section 5 was unconstitutional. After the voter ID law went into effect, voter turnout actually increased in Texas, even in urban counties with large minority populations.
5. Haygood’s Faith
Haygood presents his Christian faith publicly. His LinkedIn profile references Micah 6:8, which states that God requires people to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” His profile describes him as “saved by God’s grace,” and cites 2 Timothy 1:7, in which St. Paul writes that “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and a sound mind.”
Haygood and his wife reportedly mentor young people through C.H.O.S.E.N., a Newark-based group that “seeks to prepare young people for purpose-driven living by developing and supporting spiritual growth, character, educational excellence, leadership, advocacy, and community service.”
The SPLC may have chosen Haygood as CEO in part to address accusations that the SPLC is anti-Christian. Haygood’s faith arguably does not answer this charge, however, because the SPLC still demonizes traditional Christian doctrine on marriage and sexuality as “hateful.”
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