Derrick Albert Bell Jr.

BELL, DERRICK ALBERT, JR.

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was the first tenured black law professor at Harvard Law School, a renegade CIVIL RIGHTS scholar and proponent and a prolific author of civil rights-related works, including the critically acclaimed books And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987) and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992).
Bell was born November 6, 1930, in Pittsburgh.
The seeds of his views on racial injustice—
and his response to racial bigotry and
prejudice—were sown in the Great Depression.
When he was five years old, he watched his
mother, Ada Elizabeth Bell, demand that the
family’s landlord fix the rotted stairs behind their apartment. His mother finally told the landlord, who had ignored her requests for months, that she refused to pay the rent unless he fixed the stairs. A few days later, the landlord fixed their steps—and all the other broken steps on their road. Bell’s interpretation of the event? “Good things happen when you push.”
Bell has also said that he carries his father’s “dignified suspicion” of whites in hard-time
Pittsburgh and his mother’s homespun conception of a rights-based economy of self-respecting agitation.
The eldest of four children, Bell earned a
bachelor of arts degree and an Air Force commission
when he graduated from Duquesne
University in 1952, and then he served in the
KOREAN WAR.While in the Air Force, Bell made
his first discreet push for racial equality: he complained
to the commanding officer at a base in
Louisiana about black soldiers having to sit in
the back of the bus whenever they left base.After
his military stint, he attended the University of
Pittsburgh School of Law, lived at home, and
kept the books for his father, Derrick Bell Sr.,
who ran a trash-collection business. Bell was
elected as the associate editor-in-chief for the
Pittsburgh Law Review, a prestigious position for
a student to hold at any law school. He competed
strenuously in law school and has admitted
to being “a little obnoxious” in his attempt to
succeed in an otherwise all-white class: in the
yearbook, underneath his picture, the following
description is given: “Knows everything and
wants others to know he knows everything.”
After graduating fourth in his class and
being admitted to the District of Columbia bar
in 1957, Bell applied to a top local law firm,
which had asked the law school to send over its
best students. “When I walked in, there were all
these gasps,” he said. “It was like a line of heart
attacks down the hall.” Bell did not get the job,
but he did go on to become one of only three
black attorneys at the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
after being assigned to the Civil Rights
Division. His first professional act of defiance
came in 1959, when he quit his job at the Justice
Department in protest after being told to give up
his membership in the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
which the Justice Department considered a conflict
of interest.
Bell returned to Pittsburgh and although he
had passed the Pennsylvania bar, he accepted the
position of executive secretary of the NAACP’s
Pittsburgh branch. A year later he was recruited by its then-director, THURGOOD MARSHALL, to
join the staff of the NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND
EDUCATIONAL FUND to champion the cause of
racial equality. After starting as the executive
secretary for the Pittsburgh branch of the
Defense Fund, Bell was promoted to first assistant
counsel at the New York City branch, where
he remained from 1960 to 1966.While working
as a civil rights lawyer, he confronted many difficult
people and situations—from judges predisposed
to ruling against his black clients to
segregated public buildings. During this time,
Bell spent a night in jail in Mississippi for
refusing to leave a train station’s “whites-only”
waiting room. He oversaw 300 SCHOOL DESEGREGATION
cases and played a central role in getting
JAMES MEREDITH, a black student, admitted
to the all-white University of Mississippi, despite
the resistance of Governor Ross Barnett. “Down
South, I learned a lot. . . . It just seems that unless
something’s pushed, unless you litigate or
protest, nothing happens,” Bell said.
In 1966 Bell was admitted to the New York
bar. From 1966 to 1968, he served as deputy
director of the U.S. Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare’s Office for Civil Rights. In
1968 he moved to California and became the
executive director of the Western Center of Law
and Poverty, at the University of Southern California
(USC). He passed the California bar in
1969 and taught law as an adjunct professor at
USC’s law center.
After the 1968 assassination of Dr. MARTIN
LUTHER KING JR. and inner-city riots, Bell
received a number of offers to teach law, including
one from Harvard. He accepted Harvard’s
offer and lectured there from 1969 to 1971, after
telling the school that he was willing to be the
first black there but not the last. In 1971, after
Bell challenged the school to vote on his tenure,
he became the law school’s first tenured African
American faculty member, a position he kept
until December 1980. During his tenure, he
wrote several articles and the text, Race, Racism
and American Law (1973; 4th ed. in 2000).
Bell left Harvard in January 1981 to become
a professor and the dean of the University of
Oregon School of Law. He resigned from there
in 1985, when the school refused to back his
decision to offer a tenure-line position to an
Asian American woman. The same year, he published
the foreword in the Harvard Law Review,
“The Civil Rights Chronicles.” In 1996 the Society
of American Law Teachers named him
Teacher of the Year.
After leaving Oregon, Bell spent a semester
the next year as a visiting professor at Stanford
Law School, where, once again, he found himself
mired in controversy—this time for his revisionist
teaching of CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. Some
Stanford law students, who disliked Bell’s interpretation
of the Constitution, pressured the faculty
into offering supplemental lectures from
other professors. Shortly before the first of these
additional lectures, Stanford’s Black Law Student
Association staged a protest, and the
administration made a formal apology to Bell.
In the fall of 1986 Bell returned to Harvard
to teach law. He soon was caught up—yet
again—in racial discord. During commencement
exercises in May of 1987, he staged a fourday
round-the-clock sit-in inside his office to
protest the denial of tenure to two members of
the CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES movement, a leftist movement that challenges the basic tenets of
LEGAL EDUCATION and scholarship. Also in
1987, Bell’s alter ego, Geneva Crenshaw, who
had first come to life in his Harvard Law School
foreword, became the heroine in the pages of his
book And We Are Not Saved. At the fulcrum of
this collection of ten allegorical tales was the
contention that racism is an immutable, permanent
problem in U.S. society; Bell used Socratic
dialogues between himself, as narrator, and
Crenshaw, a black civil rights lawyer, to measure
the “progress” of blacks since BROWN V. BOARD
OF EDUCATION, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L.
Ed. 1083 (1955). Further, in 1987, Bell spoke out
in support of Justice Thurgood Marshall, whose
minority report that year had criticized the Constitution
and blacks’ “token presence” in the
bicentennial celebrations: “We need . . . more
candor about why the Constitution was written
the way it was and what still needs to be done to
insure individual rights,” said Bell.
The following year, Bell wrote Civil Rights in
Two Thousand Four: Where Will We Be? Also in
1988, he wrote a scathing indictment of Harvard
Law’s AFFIRMATIVE ACTION performance;
his article, published in 1989 by the Michigan
Law Review, gave a fictional account of how
Harvard came to hire more minorities only
after the school’s black faculty and the university
president were killed in a terrorist bombing.
Bell was privately criticized for having
dared to paint a grisly portrait of the president
of Harvard being blown to pieces. Robert C.
Clark, a professor at Harvard and a future dean
of the school, objected to Bell’s many protests,
saying, “This is a university, not a lunch counter
in the Deep South.” “In its own way, this law
school is as much in need of reform as the
lunch counters of the South, although in a far
more subtle way,” said Bell. Clark later apologized
and spoke of sharing Bell’s goal of building
a diverse faculty.
Bell’s dissension at Harvard came to a head
in the spring of 1990, when Professor Regina
Austin was denied tenure at the law school. In
early April, students on 50 law campuses boycotted
classes in a call for more minority teachers;
later that month, Bell announced that he
would step down—and forgo his $100,000
annual salary—until a black or other minority
woman was considered for tenure. Of the
school’s sixty-five full-time professors at the
time, five were white women and five were black
men.
Bell’s position was that qualified persons of
color were not getting through an obsolete and
irrelevant tenure-granting process, despite their
qualifications and the valuable perspective they
could provide law students. He said the traditional
checklist for tenure—Was the candidate
at the top of his or her law class? an editor on law
review? someone with prestigious clerkships?—
must be made more flexible when considering
minority professors. “The traditional way of
doing legal scholarship doesn’t do justice to our
experience,” said Bell. “But minorities who are
trying to blaze new trails in legal academia are
meeting opposition and silencing.” Comparing
Bell to Rosa Parks—a black woman who refused
to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, in 1955—the Reverend JESSE JACKSON
offered in May 1990 to mediate between the
school and Bell. Harvard turned down the offer.
Many observers marveled at the public
attention attracted by Bell’s dramatic move at
Harvard—among them, Richard H. Chused,
professor of the Georgetown University Law
Center, who in 1989 published an empirical
study demonstrating the lack of diversity within
law school faculties, and Nathaniel R. Jones,
judge for the federal Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals and a part-time Harvard Law instructor.
Not all of Bell’s colleagues agreed with this
form of protest, however. Professor Charles
Fried, of Harvard Law, called Bell “off his head,”
and others termed him “counterproductive.”
Dean Clark continued to assert that Harvard
should make appointments based on merits and
not because of protests.
Bell’s struggle with Harvard may not have
been entirely for naught: in September 1992,
Dean Clark acknowledged bitter divisions
within the school and created a working group
of faculty, students, and staff to improve the
level of civility and community and to foster discussion
of issues that had shaken the institution.
And in June 1993, Harvard granted tenure to its
seventh black law professor, Charles Ogletree.
In the early 2000s, Bell was continued to be
a prolific writer. In addition to publishing other
books such as Confronting Authority: Reflections
of An Ardent Protestor (1996), Constitutional
Conflicts (1997), Afrolantica Legacies (1998), and
Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and
Worth (2002), he is also the author of a foreword
in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader. Bell’s articles
have appeared in the New York Times Magazine,
the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor as well as Essence,
and Mother Jones magazine.
Since 1991 Bell has been a visiting professor
at New York University Law School.He has written
commentary for a number of legal journals
including those of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and
the University of Michigan. Bell continues to
lecture around the country and to comment on
legal issues on radio and television programs.
He anticipated that New York University Press
would publish his book critiquing the 1954 decision
in Brown v. Board of Education in early
2004.
FURTHER READINGS
“Action of Harvard’s Prof. Bell Focuses Attention on Diversity.”
1990. National Law Journal (May 7).
Association of American Law Schools. 1993. Directory of Law
Teachers. Association of American Law Schools.
“Bell, Harvard Agree to Disagree on His Departure.” 1992.
National Law Journal (July 20).
“Bell Still Teaching.” 1990. National Law Journal (November
12).
“Bell Wants Harvard.” 1992. National Law Journal (March
23).
Carter, Stephen L. 1991. Reflections of an Affirmative Action
Baby. New York: Basic Books.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 1999. Critical Race
Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia: Temple Univ.
Press.
Essed, Philomena, and Davie Goldberg. 2001 ed. Race Critical
Theories. New York: Blackwell.
“In Move to NYU, Derrick Bell Cites Friendship with Its
Dean.” 1991. National Law Journal (April 22).
“Prof.Moves.” 1991. National Law Journal (April 15).
CROSS-REFERENCES
Civil Rights; Discrimination; Legal Education.