Derrick Bell Popular Books

Derrick Bell Biography & Facts

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi. After a decade as a civil rights lawyer, Bell moved into academia where he spent the second half of his life. He started teaching at the University of Southern California, then moved to Harvard Law School where he became the first tenured African-American professor of law in 1971. From 1991 until his death in 2011, Bell was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law, and a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. While he was a visiting, he was a professor of constitutional law. Bell developed important scholarship, writing many articles and multiple books, using his practical legal experience and his academic research to examine racism, particularly in the legal system. Bell questioned civil rights advocacy approaches, partially stemming from frustrations in his own experiences as a lawyer. Bell is often credited as one of the originators of critical race theory. Early life and education Law career After graduation and a recommendation from then United States associate attorney general William P. Rogers, Bell took a position with the newly formed Department of Justice in the Honor Graduate Recruitment Program. Due to his interests in racial issues, he transferred to the Civil Rights Division. He was one of the few Black lawyers working for the Justice Department at the time. Bell was the first academic in law that created a casebook that explored and examined the law's impact and relationship on race and racism. Along with this he examined how race and racism shaped law-making, during a time when connecting these ideas was not considered legitimate. NAACP and school desegregation cases Derrick Bell worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1960 to 1966. In 1959, the Justice Department 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. Rather than give up his NAACP membership and compromise his principles, Bell left the Justice Department. Bell returned to Pittsburgh and joined the local chapter of the NAACP. Soon afterward in 1960, Bell was recruited by Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP's legal arm and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). Bell would join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Pittsburgh, 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 where during his trips to the state, he had to be very cautious. For example, once while in Jackson, he was arrested for using a white-only phone booth. After returning to NY, "Marshall mordantly joked that, if he got himself killed in Mississippi, the L.D.F. would use his funeral as a fund-raiser." When Bell was in Mississippi, he provided legal support to Mississippi schools, colleges, voting rights activists, and Freedom Riders. He also supported James Meredith's attempt to attend the Ole Miss Law School in 1962. While working at the LDF, Bell supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases working closely with Motley, MEggar Evers, and HistoryMakers Robert L. Carter and Julius Chambers and spearheaded the fight of James Meredith to secure admission to the University of Mississippi, over the protests of Governor Ross Barnett. Bell recalls the fear he expereinced by rural African American communities in Mississippi when the first school in the state was desegregated. Afterward, he said of this period,"I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality...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." Later in life, Bell questioned the approach of integration they took in these school cases. Throughout the South, often the winning rulings and the following desegregation caused white flight, ultimately keeping the schools segregated. Later, as an academic, these practical results led him to conclude that "racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it." Academic career Overview Bell spent the second half of his career working in academia until his death in 2011. During this time, he worked at a number of prestigious law schools while at the authoring books which now considered the foundation of critical race theory. Bell worked towards the creation of what he considered a more inclusive faculty within institutions such as USC, Harvard, and NYU. Bell was known to be respectful of all beliefs and his class was described by his students to be the "least indoctrinated class" in their Law school. Bell would give his students the most freedom to reach their own conclusions and to build their own arguments that could be reasonable, despite their political beliefs. USC Law School Bell's first law faculty position began in 1967 at the USC Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California. There, he succeeded Martin Levine as executive director of the new Western Center on Law and Poverty. Among his notable cases was a class action suit against the Los Angeles Police Department on behalf of the city's Black residents. During Bell's directorship, the Western Center's work was recognized in 1971 with a trophy bestowed by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California. Harvard Law School In 1969, Black Harvard Law School students helped to get Bell hired. They had protested for a minority faculty member and Derek Bok hired Bell to teach as a lecturer. Bok promised that Bell would be "the first but not the last" of his Black hires. In 1971, Bell became Harvard Law's first Black tenured professor. During his time 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. He resigned from his position at Harvard in protest of the school's hiring procedures, specifically the absence of women of color on the staff. University of Oregon School of Law In 1980, Bell started a five-year tenure as the Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. There, he also taught a course on "Race, Racism and the Law" using his textbook of the same name. In 1985, Bell's tenure was interrupted by his resignation following a protest, due to the university's refusal to.... Discover the Derrick Bell popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Derrick Bell books.