Bell, Derrick Albert, Jr., 1930-2011

Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is a distinguished scholar and prolific writer on current issues, most notably civil rights in the United States. His writings and lectures have examined racism's workings in American society, and the legal remedies for racism as it is expressed in law and custom. He is or has been a member of the D.C., Pennsylvania, New York State, City of New York, and California bar associations.

After serving in the USA Air Force in Korea, he earned his BA in Political Science from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and his LLB from the University of Pittsburgh in 1957 - three years after the Supreme Court invalidated the principle of racially segregated schools in United States in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas . Bell became associated with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1960 (as first assistant counsel) and worked under the close tutelage and influence of Thurgood Marshall, later USA Justice Marshall, who hired him from his position as Executive Director of the Pittsburgh NAACP (DAB to Ellen S. Silberman, July 7, 1978, Box 10:7). After serving for two years as a staff attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, he resigned because the department asked him to withdraw his membership from the NAACP. Bell became assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and between 1960 and 1966 he administered 300 desegregation cases regarding schools and restaurant chains in the South. Another influence on Bell in this period was U.S. Attorney Constance Baker Motley, later U.S. Judge Motley, with whom he worked in New York City and Mississippi through 1966.

Bell left the NAACP - LDEF in 1966 to become Deputy Director of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). He then left government service in 1968 for academia, first teaching at UCLA's Western Center on Law and Poverty. When Derrick Bell joined the faculty of Harvard University Law School in 1969, he became the first African-American professor at that institution. Bell became the first tenured black professor at the Harvard Law School in 1971. He served on the Harvard faculty as professor from 1969-1980 and 1986-1992.

In 1981 Bell left Harvard Law School for the University of Oregon Law School where he was Dean until 1985. He was a visiting professor at other institutions in the period of 1985-1986. He resigned his post at Oregon in protest over the University's refusal to offer a faculty position to a "woman of color." He returned to Harvard Law School in 1987 and subsequently took unpaid leave from that institution during the 1990-91 and 1991-92 academic years to protest the lack of diversity of the Harvard Law School faculty but retained his rank and appointment through the end of that period. He took a visiting professorship at New York University Law School from 1990-1992 and is now a tenured member of the faculty at NYU.

Bell's written work, both in fiction and non-fiction has been widely praised for its imagination and spirituality and he has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor, and university legal journals such as: Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Michigan. Several of his books are considered "best-sellers," including: And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and Race, Racism and American Law .

Bell has long expressed opinions regarding the permanence of racism and legal remedies aimed at benefiting minorities inevitably benefiting majority groups. These ideological convictions have placed him at odds with some African-American organizations with different ideas regarding the eradication of inequality in education, housing, and other areas. His opinions have also diverged greatly from both white and black colleagues in law, political activism, government, and academia.

Sources:

From the guide to the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Papers, 1950-2006, (New York University Archives)