Derrick Bell

Law Professor, Author

Derrick Bell is a law professor and author. A controversial figure, due to his vociferous protests against racist policies, Bell nonetheless has had a distinguished career in law and education for years.

In 1971, Bell became the first tenured professor at Harvard of African-American descent, but left the position in 1992, after a two-year leave of absence that he took to protest the school’s lack of African-American women in the faculty. His protest garnered national news coverage and stirred the passions of many students, but failed to result in any formal policy change by Harvard administrators.

In fact, that sort of story is typical of Derrick Bell. In Oregon, where Bell, having left Harvard, had held the deanship at the Oregon Law School from 1980, a similar case cropped up in 1985. The administration there blocked the hiring of a minority candidate; an Asian-American woman who had been listed third on the list of candidates for the position. After the first two candidates—both white males—declined the position, the administration directed Bell to reopen the search rather than extend the offer to the qualified minority candidate. Bell then left his post in protest, going back to Harvard.

Prior to his years at Harvard, Bell served as the executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty at the University of Southern California Law School, counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

A prolific writer, Bell has authored nine books, generally on the legal struggles the African American community has made for equality throughout the years. He has also been published in over a dozen legal journals of various universities and national magazines.

The New York Times summed up the overarching theme in Bell’s works Despite all the changes over the years, “Racism is not a passing phase but a permanent feature of American life.”

His story, The Space Traders (from the book Faces at the Bottom of the Well) was made into an HBO movie by the Hudlin brothers, starring Robert Guillaume, in 1994.  Many of his works have been used as university textbooks. His 1973 text, Race, Racism and American Law, will be published in a 6th edition available in the Spring, 2008, has been adopted by both law school and undergraduate courses. His book, Ethical Ambition, has been assigned as summer reading at several colleges. 

Bell graduated from Schenley High School in Pennsylvania, and was offered a scholarship to Lincoln University which he was unable to make use of due to a lack of financial aid. As the first college-educated member of his family, he graduated Duquesne University and earned his A.B. in 1952. Having joined the ROTC in school, Bell was recruited to fight in Korea as part of the U.S. Air Force. He returned in 1954, and went to the University of Pittsburgh Law School with the goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer, earning his L.L.B. in an otherwise all-white class, in 1957. He went to work for the U.S. Justice Department, but left in 1959 when he refused to resign from the NAACP. He was then recruited to join that organization’s Legal Defense Fund by Thurgood Marshall. Bell did a lot of work in Mississippi during this period, supervising the legal aspects of school desegregation cases, and other civil rights issues. Before going to work at Harvard, he also worked as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1966), and as executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty at the University of Southern California Law School (1968).

His wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, died of breast cancer in 1990. Scholarship awards were established as a memorial to Jewel, who, in the 1980's, was the Director of the Council of Minority Education, now known as the Office of Multicultural Academic Support, at the University of Oregon. Bell married Janet Dewart in 1992. He has three children from his first marriage in 1960; Derrick Albert III, Douglas Dubois, and Carter Robeson.

Bell's scholarly writings have garnered many awards and placed him in the forefront of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a jurisprudence that explores the influences of society's racism and sexism in the law's policies and precedents.