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Books by Derrick
Bell
Faces at the Bottom of the Well /
Silent Covenants /
Race, Racism and American Law
/
Ethical Ambition /
Gospel Choirs
Confronting Authority /
Afrolantica Legacies /
And we Are Not Saved
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Derrick Bell Law Professor and Rights Advocate Dies at
80
Excerpts by Fred
A. Bernstein
6 October
2011
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who saw persistent
racism in America and sought to expose it through books,
articles and provocative career moves—he gave up a
Harvard Law School professorship to protest the
school’s hiring practices—died on Wednesday in
Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Janet Dewart
Bell, said.
Mr. Bell was the
first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and
later the first black dean of a law school that was not
historically black. But he was perhaps better known for
resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.
While he was working at the Civil Rights Division of the
Justice Department in his 20s, his superiors told him to
give up his membership in the
N.A.A.C.P., believing it posed a conflict of
interest. Instead he quit the department, ignoring the
advice of friends to try to change it from within.
Thirty years later,
when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar
advice. At the time, he said, his first wife, Jewel
Hairston Bell, had asked him, “Why does it always have
to be you?” The question trailed him afterward, he wrote
in a 2002 memoir, “Ethical Ambition,” as did another
posed by unsympathetic colleagues: “Who do you think you
are?”Professor Bell, soft-spoken and erudite, was “not
confrontational by nature,” he wrote. But he attacked
both conservative and liberal beliefs. In 1992, he told
The New York Times that black Americans were more
subjugated than at any time since slavery. And he wrote
that in light of the often violent struggle that
resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation
decision, Brown v. Board of Education, things
might have worked out better if the court had instead
ordered that both races be provided with truly
equivalent schools.
He was a pioneer of
critical race theory—a body of legal scholarship that
explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal
institutions, even many of those intended to redress
past injustices. His 1973 book,
Race, Racism and American Law, became a staple
in law schools and is now in its sixth edition. Mr. Bell
“set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in
the academy, not just the legal academy,” said
Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join
Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on
Wednesday. . . .
Professor Bell’s
core beliefs included what he called “the interest
convergence dilemma”—the idea that whites would not
support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless
it was in their interest. Asked how the status of blacks
could be improved, he said he generally supported civil
rights litigation, but cautioned that even favorable
rulings would probably yield disappointing results and
that it was best to be prepared for that.
Much of Professor
Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor
of stories. In books and law review articles, he
presented parables and allegories about race relations,
then debated their meaning with a fictional alter ego, a
professor named Geneva Crenshaw, who forced him to
confront the truth about racism in America.
One his best-known
parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his
1992 book,
Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of
Racism. In the story, as Professor Bell later
described it, creatures from another planet offer the
United States “enough gold to retire the
national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse
America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless
source of safe energy to replace our dwindling
reserves.” In exchange, the creatures ask for only one
thing: America’s black population, which would be sent
to outer space. The white population accepts the offer
by an overwhelming margin. (In 1994 the story was
adapted as one of three segments in a television movie
titled “Cosmic Slop.”) . . .
Professor Bell’s
narrative technique nonetheless became an accepted mode
of legal scholarship, giving female, Latino and gay
scholars a new way to introduce their experiences into
legal discourse. Reviewing “Faces at the Bottom of the
Well” in The New York Times, the Supreme Court
reporter
Linda Greenhouse wrote: “The stories challenge old
assumptions and then linger in the mind in a way that a
more conventionally scholarly treatment of the same
themes would be unlikely to do.”
Source:
NYTimes
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Derrick Albert
Bell, Jr. was born on November 6, 1930 in
Pittsburgh, the eldest of four children. At an early
age, Derrick’s parents, Ada Elizabeth Childress Bell, a
homemaker, and Derrick A. Bell, Sr., a millworker and
department store porter, instilled in him a serious work
ethic and the drive to confront authority.
Derrick was the
first person in his family to go to college. He attended
Duquesne University, where he earned an undergraduate
degree and served in the school ROTC. He then served as
a lieutenant in the United States Air Force, where he
was stationed in Korea and Louisiana.
After his military
service, Derrick entered law school at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Law, where he was the only black
student in his class of 140, and only one of three black
students in the school. He spoke up in class, earned
good grades and was elected an associate editor-in-chief
of the Law Review.
Upon graduation in
1957, Derrick joined the newly formed Department of
Justice in the Honor Graduate Recruitment Program and
then was transferred to the Civil Rights Division a year
later because of his interests in racial issues. His
tenure there proved short because his superiors
expressed concern over his two dollar membership in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). After Derrick’s refusal to surrender his
NAACP membership, senior officials physically moved
Derrick’s desk into the Department’s hallway and reduced
the docket of cases on which he was assigned. In 1959,
after repeated requests that Derrick relinquish his
NAACP membership, Derrick instead resigned his position.
Returning to
Pittsburgh, Derrick took a job with the local chapter of
the NAACP. While there in 1960, Derrick married Jewel
Hairston, who was also a civil rights activist and
educator. They were married until Jewel’s death in 1990.
Jewel and Derrick had three sons: Derrick III, Douglass
Dubois, and Carter Robeson. Douglass was named after
Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Robeson
was named after Derrick’s long-time mentor, Judge Robert
L. Carter, and Paul Robeson. Derrick believed deeply in
the importance of family and love.
While working in
Pittsburgh, Derrick met Thurgood Marshall, who was then
the head of the NAACP’s legal arm, the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund (LDF). Marshall knew of Derrick’s
resignation and was impressed by him, so he asked
Derrick to join his staff. Derrick accepted on the
spot.From 1960-1966, Derrick worked to dismantle the
vestiges of Jim Crow and school segregation in the south
alongside Thurgood Marshall, future federal court judges
Robert L. Carter and Constance Baker Motley, Lewis
Steel, Jack Greenberg and others. Derrick supervised
more than 300 school desegregation cases in the South.
Upon leaving LDF, he continued his school desegregation
work as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights
in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
During this time, Derrick became interested in teaching
law, but his initial applications to a few law schools
went nowhere.
He was then offered
a job as the first executive director of the Western
Center on Law and Poverty at the University of Southern
California Law School where he ran a public interest law
center and taught his first classes.— ProfessorDerrickBell
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Derrick A. Bell, Jr. (Nov. 6,
1930 - Oct. 5, 2011) was the first tenured
African-American professor of Law at
Harvard University, and largely credited as the
originator of
Critical Race Theory. Born in the
Hill District of
Pittsburgh, Bell received an A.B. from
Duquesne University in 1952 and an
LL.B. from the
University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1957.
After graduation, and after a recommendation from then
United States Associate Attorney General
William Rogers, Bell took a position with the
Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.
He was the only Black person working for the Justice
Department at the time. In 1959, the government asked
him to resign his membership in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) because it was thought that his
objectivity, and that of the department, might be
compromised or called into question. Bell quit rather
than give up his NAACP membership.
Soon afterwards,
Bell took a position as an assistant counsel for the
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF),
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, the cradle of the Deep South, where
racism was at its most virulent and entrenched. 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.
"I learned a lot
about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to
forestall equality," Bell was quoted as saying in the
Boston Globe. "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."
In the mid-1960s
Bell took a short term position with the
University of Southern California. In 1969, with the
help of protests from black students for a minority
faculty member, Bell was hired to teach at
Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Bell established a
new course in civil rights law, published a celebrated
case book,
Race, Racism and American Law, and produced a
steady stream of law review articles. As a teacher, Bell
became a mentor and role model to a generation of
students of color, but he played a delicate balancing
act at the university. Bell became the first black
tenured professor in Harvard Law School's history and
called on the university to improve its minority hiring
record. But shortly after his tenure in 1971, a white
university vice-president tried to purchase a house that
Bell had been previously offered through university;
Bell saw this as a case of discrimination. This was the
first case in which Bell's charges of racism would
mobilize his supporters, who championed his efforts to
stand up for principle, and anger his detractors, who
accused him of being too quick with his allegations of
bigotry.—Wikipedia
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On YouTube
Derrick Bell: Advice to Young African Americans
/
Derrick Bell: Civil Rights Cases
Derrick Bell: Appointed Law School Dean /
Derrick Bell: Literary Achievements
Derrick Bell: My Family /
Derrick Bell: Employed by the U.S. Department of Justice
Derrick Bell: The NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund
/
Derrick Bell Faces at the Bottom of the Well 1992
Professor Bell discussed his book, Faces at the
Bottom of the Well, published by Basic Books,
which addressed the problem of racism in America and the
class differences involved in discrimination against
minorities. In the book, he discusses the civil rights
movement in American society, and concludes that racism
is permanent, and will always be part of society.
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Derrick_Bell_Told Law Students Interview (Audio)
“Stand Up, Speak
Out,” Derrick Bell Told Law Students
Terry Gross spoke with Derrick Bell in 1992, two
years into his protest against Harvard, and six years
before
Harvard Law
School would finally grant tenure to a female black
professor.
Terry Gross, host: Now you
left Harvard on a leave without pay, saying that you
wouldn't return until an African-American woman was
given tenure at the law school.
Derrick Bell: Yeah.
Terry Gross: And after two
years of your leave without pay, you were dismissed by
Harvard because their policy is of a maximum two-year
leave.
Derrick Bell:
Right.
Terry Gross:
Let me ask you, since you think it's very important that
African-American women students have African-American
women teachers, as an African-American male professor
what do you feel that you offer your African-American
students that your white counterpart couldn't provide?
Derrick Bell:
Yeah. I teach constitutional law a course on the Supreme
Court and one on civil rights. But in all my courses, I
really have to teach the basic messages of my life—and
that is that the rewards, the satisfactions, are not in
being partner or making a million dollars, but in
recognizing evils, recognizing injustices and standing
up and speaking out about them even in absolutely losing
situations where you know it's not going to bring about
any change—that there are intangible rewards to the
spirit that make that worthwhile.
And while I
certainly miss my position at Harvard—I worked very hard
for it, and people tell me I should have stayed and
worked from within—in some ways, I am grateful for the
opportunity to, in so public a way, practice what I have
preached for so long. Because if only a few students get
that message, then those few students - to the extent
that they are able to practice it in their own lives—will
receive the kind of spiritual soul-satisfying dividends
that I think I've received, and make me believe that
that's really an important thing of what life is all
about.
Terry Gross:
You can make the argument that your method of dealing
with this by taking the lead was actually a
self-defeating way of handling it, because now the
students don't have you there either.
Derrick Bell:
That's right. But there are five other black men, all
very capable. And I think that some of them will be more
willing to step into the role that I was playing now
that I'm not there, that my presence tended to perhaps
stifle some of their development as leaders.
I learned this hard
lesson as a civil rights lawyer, when during the '60s I
would fly into town and meet with several groups, and
take down all the information about their problems and
the discrimination in the schools or in the public
accommodations, and would fly back to New York and
prepare the complaints and get them filed and handle the
cases. And I thought that—I tell you—I thought that my
place in heaven was assured.
But looking back on
it, I see that I, by my flying in, was really usurping
the leadership potential of many local people who, even
after I won the case, if they didn't organize and inform
their constituencies of what had been done through the
courts, nothing would change. So that I am much more
humble with regard to my role today than I was as a
young civil rights lawyer.
Terry Gross:
Harvard Law School wasn't the first place that you quit
in protest. In 1959, you were working in the Justice
Department and you were told to drop your membership in
the NAACP.
Derrick Bell:
Because it was a conflict of interest. I was in the new
Civil Rights Division and that seemed strange to me, and
I checked with a number of friends in important places
and almost to a person they told me stay and work from
within. And I've always been a little suspect of that
argument. It's very comfortable and convenient, but I'm
not sure that it's necessarily accurate.
In any event, I
decided that I would not resign my membership, and I
would wait for them to fire me, which they didn't. They
simply moved me out of my office into the hall and
started to give me kind of busywork, which was a message
that maybe I should leave, and that's what I did.
But in that
instance as in so many others, I went back to my
hometown, Pittsburgh, and began working as the executive
director of NAACP, and I learned long years later that
one of the people I had gone to for advice, Bill Hastie,
who was the first black federal judge, had gone to
Thurgood Marshall, his long-time friend, and told him
about my situation. So that when Thurgood came through
Pittsburgh speaking - he was then general counsel of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund—he said: boy, what's a lawyer
doing in a non-lawyer job? And I tried to explain. He
wasn't even listening. He said, come on, join me in New
York, which I did post-haste.
Well, that was a
marvellous experience, working with the Legal Defense
Fund in the early '60s, and it's an experience I
wouldn't have gotten had I not done what I thought was
right with regard to my NAACP membership with the
Justice Department.
S ource:
NPR
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Response
Patricia J. Williams Remembers
Derrick Bell
I had the great
fortune to work as a research assistant for him,
updating the first two editions of his textbook
Race, Racism and American Law. It was the best
job I ever had, not only because of what I learned about
the practice of law but because he connected me to a
practice of being. He was what Malcolm Gladwell has
called a “nodal” person: anything worth knowing could be
found through him. With all due respect to Kevin Bacon,
Derrick Bell was only two or three degrees removed from
everyone on the planet.
A few years after I
graduated from law school, Professor Bell urged me to
think about teaching. It was not a career path I ever
would have considered otherwise. This was at a time when
there were virtually no women in law teaching—to say
nothing of women of color. He said he just saw me as
teaching; and so it was. It would be too easy to say he
was visionary like that; but the truth is he made things
happen. He believed in a broadly inclusive mandate for
equality that was boundless and prescient. He pushed and
he pulled and he checked in on his students. He made
friends with them for life. He was so unqualifiedly
selfless that many of us called him Father Derrick—not
because he was ever paternalistic but because he was
such a wise provider to those of us stumbling about in a
professional world that was new, inscrutable and not
altogether welcoming. He was a mentor before we had a
word for it.— TheNation
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Ethical Ambition : Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
By Derrick Bell
Bell suggests a
more personal way of addressing life's meaning,
discussing incidents in his own life that may help
others find an answer to this question. In particular,
he stresses his need to subordinate personal ambition to
the Civil Rights Movement. His principled stand involved
him in several crucial conflicts, one of which led to
his resignation from the faculty of Harvard Law School.
(He is now a visiting professor at NYU.) Bell also
presents insights on his friendship with women and on
religion, again from a personal perspective.—Library
Journal
Bell, law professor
and former civil rights lawyer, has repeatedly shown
himself a model of principle and conscience. The first
black tenured professor in the Harvard Law School, he
endured personal sacrifice and criticism after taking a
voluntary unpaid leave of absence to protest the
school's failure to secure a woman of color in a
tenured-track position. Bell provides substantial
insight into his struggle to meet what he calls an
ethical standard. He admits that an obsession with
ambition, even in an altruistic sense, may violate the
ethical obligations owed to family. He explores the
conflicts of issues in his own religious traditions that
he negotiates to reach a higher spiritual awareness
often lost in traditional religions. Bell also cites
examples of widely known ethically principled
individuals—W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin L. King Jr.,
among others—who often strove for higher ethical
standards, alone and at great personal cost. His book
offers great insight into how an individual seeks to
live by the highest of personal standards and ideals.—
Booklist
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Afrolantica Legacies
By Derrick Bell
What I found most
impressive about this book is the way it challenges
assumptions and attitudes about Jewish racism and
hegemony. Bell is a courageous and brilliant writer, and
this is the best novel I have read in several months.
And as a feminist and white woman, I found it much more
interesting than many other books by white writers who
attempt to address these issues. Highly recommended.— Amazon
reader
Derrick Bell is the
well known former Harvard law professor who left his
tenured position at Harvard because of the school's
refusal to deal equitably with women of color. He has
written a number of books, and those featuring Geneva
Crenshaw are among his best. This latest book focuses on
racism, and takes a deeper look at Jewish-black
relationships, and the property rights in white skin
color. While most thinking black Americans wouldn't find
much to challenge here, many whites will find this a
disturbing book on a number of levels. The statement
made by the fictional president of the USA that "we can
no longer afford whiteness as an assumed right of
citizenship" is one which should engender serious
thinking among whites who want to really understand 21st
century America. Even though this book was published in
1998, the issues it raises have not disappeared with the
change in the century, increased numbers of "mixed" race
children, and increased intermarriage between American
blacks and others.— Amazon
reader
posted 10 October 2011
The
Permanence of Racism
(1992) /
Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of
Racism
(Derrick Bell)
Wife of Professor Derrick Bell speaks out
In an exclusive interview, Janet Dewart Bell, widow of
Harvard Professor Derrick Bell,
talked to Ed Schultz
about the conservative attacks on her husband’s
character
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Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The
Permanence of Racism
By
Derrick Bell
In nine
grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black
former Harvard law professor who made
headlines recently for his one-man protest
against the school's hiring policies,
hammers home his controversial theme that
white racism is a permanent, indestructible
component of our society. Bell's fantasies
are often dire and apocalyptic: a new
Atlantis rises from the ocean depths,
sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white
resistance to affirmative action softens
following an explosion that kills Harvard's
president and all of the school's black
professors; intergalactic space invaders
promise the U.S. President that they will
clean up the environment and deliver tons of
gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens
take all African Americans back to their
planet. Other pieces deal with black-white
romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job
discrimination. Civil rights lawyer Geneva
Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's
And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back
in some of these ominous allegories, which
speak from the depths of anger and despair.
Bell now teaches at New York University Law
School.—Publishers Weekly |
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world.
Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm
is a stunning achievement. Filled with new
information and shocking revelations that go
beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds
a sweeping story of race and class in
America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and
the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the
civil rights movement in the fifties and
sixties |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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