Southern Legal Resource Center

The Southern Legal Resource Center, Inc. (SLRC) is a South Carolina non-profit public law corporation which offers legal support to defend what they see as First Amendment violations, violation of civil rights, or discrimination against advocates of Southern Heritage.

The SLRC was founded in 1995 by a group of four attorneys: Carl A. Barrington (deceased), Kirk David Lyons, Larry Norman, and Lourie A. Salley, III. Lyons was appointed Chief Trial Counsel, a position he still holds, and Salley became the firm's first Board Chairman. The organization is a registered South Carolina corporation with its executive offices in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

In 1996, the SLRC successfully defended the “Blacksburg (SC) 7” and in 1999 sued a Greenville, South Carolina, private academy on behalf of Dr. Winston McCuen, a teacher at the school who had been fired for refusing to remove a Confederate flag that was part of a classroom historical display, and for refusing to salute the US in protest.

In 2004 the SLRC hired advertising executive and Southern activist Roger McCredie as its full-time Executive Director. Under McCredie the organization doubled the size of its Board of Directors, increased its advertising program and undertook an ambitious five-year growth and development plan.

The SLRC, was the first law firm to promote a legal theory developed by Lyons that combined First Amendment protection with an interpretation of the “National Origin” provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would afford federal legal protection for what Lyons termed “Confederate Southern Americans.” Using this interpretation of Civil Rights law, the SLRC undertook cases on behalf of Federal Aviation Administration workers in Florida, utility company employees in South Carolina, workers at a DuPont plant in Virginia (the "DuPont Seven"), and Cherokee students in Alabama. Federal judges have shown almost universal hostility to legal protection for “Confederate Southern Americans,” but Lyons and the SLRC still advocate for clients claiming an increase in the number of job-related persecution of “Confederate Southern Americans” and a paucity of legal protection in the workplace save for cases that come under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lyons has noted that “Republican judges are adamantly opposed to any extension of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Democratic Judges are hostile to almost all things Confederate.”

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