Bell, Derrick

BELL, DERRICK (1930––2011). Derrick Bell was a distinguished American lawyer, legal scholar, relentless fighter for racial equality, and civil rights activist. Most well-known as one of the chief developers of the influential body of legal scholarship known as Critical Race Theory, Bell led a multifaceted life devoted to a vision of ethical integrity in every dimension of his work. That vision led him to write, teach, and struggle against the persistence of American racism.

Derrick Albert Bell, Jr was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from Duquesne University in 1957. Following graduation from the University of Pittsburgh law school in 1957, he worked for the US Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division, a rare Black lawyer in that role then. But in 1959, the government asked him to resign his membership in the NAACP. Instead. he resigned from the government; this would be the first of Bell’s several principled resignations.

Bell became a legal counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he worked with other iconic civil rights lawyers including Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall. He was on the front lines in Mississippi, helping to secure the 1962 admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. Facing constant racist hostility, harassment, and physical danger, these lawyers were an integral part of the emerging 1960s civil rights movement.

After a brief time at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Bell joined the Harvard law faculty in 1969 and in 1971 became its first tenured Black professor. There, he created a new course on civil rights law and published his magisterial casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law, widely used in successive editions in many law schools nationally. In 1980, Bell was appointed Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in protest five years later to protest the denial of tenure to an Asian American woman.

Returning to Harvard, Bell again abandoned his professorship in 1992 to protest the school’s hiring practices. He led a five-day sit-in in his office to protest tenure denials to faculty who promoted critical race theory. Students widely supported Bell, but faculty members were divided and the administration was hostile. Later, he took a leave of absence to protest the absence of African American women on the faculty. After two years his leave lapsed, no minority women had been hired, and Bell’s tenure expired. Again, he paid for his political courage.

By 1990, Bell received a full-time visiting appointment at New York University School of Law, where he remained until his death. His extensive legacy of anti-racist scholarship reflected his civil rights activism throughout his life. One of many works, Ethical Ambition (2002) outlined and chronicled his advocacy of a life of ethical strength, regardless of consequence.

Bell’s most durable intellectual and political contribution is Critical Race Theory (CRT). It challenged conventional liberal views on civil rights, race, and law. Emerging from 1970s Critical Legal Studies, with its roots in Marxist thought, CRT demands a fundamental reconstruction of society that far transcends incremental legal victories. It eschews “objective” scholarly discourse and is openly and boldly antiracist in its legal analysis. It has transformed legal writing by offering storytelling and narrative forms of discourse instead of conventional legal discourse in law reviews and other texts; this was often Bell’s preferred writing method.

Derrick Bell’s many contemporary CRT descendants have continued his exemplary work, as scholars and as activists. They reflect and ensure his enduring legacy.

Bell, Derrick. Race, Racism, and American Law. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1992.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. et al, editors, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic, editors. The Derrick Bell Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Papers, 1922-2011. Guide. New York University Archives.