Derrick Bell
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
After a decade as a civil rights lawyer, Bell moved into academia where he spent the second half of his life. He started teaching at the University of Southern California, then moved to Harvard Law School where he became the first tenured African-American professor of law in 1971. Bell was the first African American dean at the University of Oregon School of Law, serving from 1981 to 1985. From 1991 until his death in 2011, Bell was a visiting professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law.
Bell developed important scholarship, writing many articles and multiple books, using his practical legal experience and his academic research to examine racism, particularly in the legal system. Bell questioned civil rights advocacy approaches, partially stemming from frustrations in his own experiences as a lawyer. Bell is often credited as one of the originators of critical race theory.
Early life and education
Bell was born on November 6, 1930, to Derrick Albert and Ada Elizabeth Childress Bell. He was raised in a working-class family in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was raised a Presbyterian. Bell's maternal grandfather, John Childress, was a blind cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His paternal grandfather was a minister in Dothan, Alabama.Bell attended Schenley High School and was the first member of his family to go to college. He was offered a scholarship to Lincoln University but could not attend due to a lack of financial aid, choosing to attend Duquesne University instead. There, he was a member of the college's Reserve Officers' Training Corps and graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1952. He then served as an officer for the United States Air Force for two years, one of which he spent in Korea.
In 1957, he received a LL.B. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he was the only Black graduate of his class. In 1960, Bell married Jewel Hairston who was also a Civil Rights activist and educator and they would go on to have three sons: Derrick, Douglas, and Carter. They were married until Jewel died in 1990. He later married Janet Dewart.
Law career
After graduation and a recommendation from then United States associate attorney general William P. Rogers, Bell took a position with the newly formed Department of Justice in the Honor Graduate Recruitment Program. Due to his interests in racial issues, he transferred to the Civil Rights Division. He was one of the few Black lawyers working for the Justice Department at the time. Bell was the first academic in law that created a casebook that explored and examined the law's impact and relationship on race and racism. Along with this he examined how race and racism shaped law-making, during a time when connecting these ideas was not considered legitimate.NAACP and school desegregation cases
In 1959, the Justice Department asked him to resign his membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People because it was thought that his objectivity, and that of the department, might be compromised or called into question. Rather than give up his NAACP membership and compromise his principles, Bell left the Justice Department.Bell returned to Pittsburgh and joined the local chapter of the NAACP. Soon afterward in 1960, Bell was recruited by Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP's legal arm and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Bell would join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Pittsburgh, crafting legal strategies at the forefront of the battle to undo racist laws and segregation in schools. At the LDF, he worked alongside other prominent civil-rights attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, and Constance Baker Motley. Bell was assigned to Mississippi where during his trips to the state, he had to be very cautious. For example, once while in Jackson, he was arrested for using a white-only phone booth. After returning to NY, "Marshall mordantly joked that, if he got himself killed in Mississippi, the L.D.F. would use his funeral as a fund-raiser." When Bell was in Mississippi, he provided legal support to Mississippi schools, colleges, voting rights activists, and Freedom Riders. He also supported James Meredith's attempt to attend the Ole Miss Law School in 1962.
While working at the LDF, Bell supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases and spearheaded the fight of James Meredith to secure admission to the University of Mississippi, over the protests of Governor Ross Barnett. Afterward, he said of this period, "I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality...I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed unless you litigate, nothing happens."
Later in life, Bell questioned the approach of integration they took in these school cases. Throughout the South, often the winning rulings and the following desegregation caused white flight, ultimately keeping the schools segregated. Later, as an academic, these practical results led him to conclude that "racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it."
Academic career
Overview
Bell spent the second half of his career working in academia until his death in 2011. During this time, he worked at a number of law schools while authoring books which are now considered the foundation of critical race theory. Bell worked towards the creation of what he considered a more inclusive faculty within institutions such as USC, Harvard, and NYU. Bell was known to be respectful of all beliefs and his class was described by his students to be the "least indoctrinated class" in their law school. Bell would give his students freedom to reach their own conclusions and to build their own arguments that could be reasonable, despite their political beliefs.USC Law School
Bell's first law faculty position began in 1967 at the USC Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California. There, he succeeded Martin Levine as executive director of the new Western Center on Law and Poverty. Among his notable cases was a class action suit against the Los Angeles Police Department on behalf of the city's Black residents. During Bell's directorship, the Western Center's work was recognized in 1971 with a trophy bestowed by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California.Harvard Law School
In 1969, Black Harvard Law School students helped to get Bell hired. They had protested for a minority faculty member and Derek Bok hired Bell to teach as a lecturer. Bok promised that Bell would be "the first but not the last" of his Black hires. In 1971, Bell became Harvard Law's first Black tenured professor. During his time at Harvard, Bell established a new course in civil rights law, published a book, Race, Racism and American Law, and produced a steady stream of law review articles. He resigned from his position at Harvard in protest of the school's hiring procedures, specifically the absence of women of color on the staff.University of Oregon School of Law
In 1981, Bell started a five-year tenure as the Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. There, he also taught a course on "Race, Racism and the Law" using his textbook of the same name. Later, Bell's tenure was interrupted by his resignation following a protest, due to the university's refusal to hire an Asian-American woman he had chosen for a faculty position.NYU School of Law
Bell's full time visiting professorship at New York University began in 1991. After his two-year leave of absence, his position at Harvard ended and he remained at NYU where he continued to write and lecture on issues of race and civil rights. He related these issues to music in a book of parables and introduced the Bell Annual Gospel Choir Concert, which is a tradition at the school today. During his time at NYU Law, Bell supported a student organization who were demanding the university hire more faculty of color. Taking advice from Bell, the student organization led silent protests outside faculty meetings.Protests over faculty diversity
During the summer of 1981, under the auspices of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bell conducted a multi-week seminar in Race Relations Law for 14 lawyers and judges from across Oregon. The University of Oregon School of Law was not the only place Bell fought to create a more diverse and inclusive faculty.Following his return to Harvard in 1986, after a year-long stint at Stanford University. Bell staged a five-day sit-in in his office. The goal was to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to two professors on staff, both of whose work promoted CRT. The sit-in was widely supported by students, but divided the faculty, as Harvard administrators claimed the professors were denied tenure for substandard scholarship and teaching.
In 1990, Harvard Law School had 60 tenured professors. Three of them were Black men and five were women; none of these women were African-American. Displeased with this dearth of diversity among the faculty, Bell decided to protest with an unpaid leave of absence. Students supported the move which critics found "counterproductive," while Harvard administrators cited a lack of qualified candidates, defending that they had taken great strides in the previous decade to bring in Black faculty members. He details the story of this protest in his book Confronting Authority.
Bell's protest at Harvard provoked angry criticism and backlash. Opposing Harvard Law faculty called him "a media manipulator who unfairly attacked the school," noting that other people had accused him of "depriv students of an education while he makes money on the lecture circuit."
Following his leave of absence at Harvard, Bell accepted a visiting professorship at NYU Law in 1991. After two years, Harvard had still not hired any minority women, and Bell requested an extension of his leave, which the school refused, thereby ending his tenure. It was not until later in 1998, Harvard Law hired a civil rights attorney and U.S. assistant attorney general nominee Lani Guinier, who became the law school's first Black female tenured professor.
In March 2012, five months after his death, Bell became the target of conservative media, including Breitbart and Sean Hannity, in an exposé of President Barack Obama. The controversy focused on a 1990 video of Obama praising Bell at a protest by Harvard Law School students over the perceived lack of diversity in the school's faculty. Bell's widow stated that Bell and Obama had "very little contact" after Obama's law school graduation. She said that as far as she remembered, "He never had contact with the president as president." An examination of Senior Lecturer Obama's syllabus for his course on race and law at the University of Chicago revealed significant differences between Obama's perspective and that of Derrick Bell, even as Obama drew on major writings of critical race theory.