Early Life
The oldest of the four children of Derrick Albert Bell and Ada Elizabeth (Childress) Bell, Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was born November 6, 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, a native of Alabama who left school after the sixth grade, ran a small garbage collection business while his children were growing up. He made a point of telling Derrick Jr. that he did not trust white people. His mother taught him to never back down when he was in the right. Bell enjoyed telling a story about the time his mother risked eviction by taking her landlord to task for not repairing the steps behind the family’s brick row house. With Derrick Jr. in tow, she waved the rent money in front of the landlord, saying, as Bell recalled to a reporter in an interview for People (May 14, 1990), “I have the money, and you will get it when you fix my back stairs so my kids won’t fall.” The landlord fixed not only the steps but the neighbors’ steps as well. “I’ll never forget it,” Bell continued. “We were this little, poor, black family and we could have been evicted, but she stood up to him.”
In the early 1950s, while living in Louisiana, Bell demonstrated that he had learned his mother’s lesson well. By then, he had graduated from college, having taken his A.B. degree with a major in political science from Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, in 1952, and enlisted in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of second lieutenant. Since he had been raised as a Presbyterian, Bell wanted to attend the local Presbyterian church, all of whose members were white. The minister reluctantly allowed him to attend the service, though only if Bell agreed to sit by himself in the balcony. With that battle won, Bell asked if he could join the church choir. “I’m not on some God-given mission,” he told Fox Butterfield, who profiled him for The New York Times (May 21, 1990). “But it just seemed natural that if I wanted to sing in the choir, why shouldn’t I sing in the choir?” The pastor had not yet agreed to Bell’s second request before Bell was transferred to Korea.
After completing his military service, in 1954, Bell entered the University of Pittsburgh Law School. His admittance into the school was a milestone of sorts for Bell, for it brought him one step closer to fulfilling his childhood ambition of becoming a lawyer. During his years there, he distinguished himself as the associate editor of the school’s law review, and in 1957, he took his LL.B. degree, graduating fourth in a class in which he was the only black student. In the same year he was admitted to the District of Columbia bar and he subsequently became licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, New York, and California.
Life’s Work
Bell’s first job after law school was with the United States Department of Justice, where, in 1957, he was hired as a staff attorney in the civil rights division. Those were exciting years for civil rights leaders, Bell included. Just three years earlier the United States Supreme Court had handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. More significant, the decision generated hope that racial discrimination would soon be a thing of the past.
Bell’s optimism was tempered, however, by the Justice Department’s request, in 1959, that he resign his membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People because of a possible conflict of interest. Bell refused. “I thought about it and talked to a number of individuals whom I respected,” he told Andrea Sachs, who interviewed him for Emerge (October 1992). “Every one of them told me that I should resign the NAACP and stay in government, that I could do more working from the inside. But I told the assistant attorney general that it just didn’t make sense to me and that I was not going to resign.” Rather than fire him outright, his superiors moved his desk into the hallway and assigned him “busy work,” he has recalled. The department’s action ultimately prompted Bell to quit his government job and return to Pittsburgh, where he became executive secretary of the Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP.
In the following years, Bell decided that he wanted to pursue an academic career, but that aspiration was repeatedly frustrated by his inability to interest prospective employers in his candidacy, he told Current Biography. His legal expertise and high ethical standards were, however, just what the leaders of the civil rights movement needed, and before long he found himself in the thick of the civil rights legal wars. As first assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, from 1960 until 1966, Bell handled school desegregation cases in Mississippi and helped to secure James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi over Governor Ross Barnett’s objection. He also carried on his struggle against racism outside the courtroom. On one occasion, for instance, he was jailed for refusing to leave a “whites only” waiting room in the Jackson, Mississippi train station. In an interview with Fox Butterfield, a colleague of Bell’s at the NAACP said of him, “It was obvious from the first minute that while Derrick was an excellent lawyer, he had a belief that you had to take personal stands.”
In 1966, notwithstanding his somewhat unpleasant experience at the Justice Department several years before, Bell returned to government work taking a job as deputy director in the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. At the time, the department’s mandate was to ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Less than a year after taking the job, he resigned, having finally landed his first academic post: that of executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty of the University of Southern California Law School.
Meanwhile, college students throughout the United States were up in arms over what they felt was a lack of moral leadership in the government and at universities and other elite institutions. Students at Harvard University, galvanized by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, were especially outraged by the paucity of black professors, and in 1969, in response to their protests, the administration invited Derrick Bell to join its law school’s faculty. On accepting the offer, Bell became the university’s first black law professor. Two years later, he became the first black man to receive tenure at the school. Although he realized that he was Harvard Law School’s token black professor, he preferred to think of his appointment as an opportunity to help build an intellectually and culturally diverse faculty at the university.
Bell was also interested in propagating his approach to the study of law, a controversial philosophy that has become known as critical race theory. Proponents of the theory argue that the law is not based on neutral principles but on a world view that perpetuates the notion that white people are superior to individuals of other races. The only remedy, critical race theorists argue, is to study and analyze the law from the perspective of racial minorities. “Even liberal white scholars have to imagine oppression, and have to imagine that they are not oppressors,” Bell explained to Rosemary L. Bray, who interviewed him for The New York Times Book Review (October 11, 1987). “Black people have stories and experiences that provide the basis not only for their lives but for their scholarship.” Although Bell and other critical race theorists have gained a measure of respect in recent years, their ideas continue to be regarded as somewhat suspect by mainstream legal scholars.
Bell’s somewhat idiosyncratic thoughts on racism became the subject of considerable media attention in 1990, when he took an unpaid leave of absence from Harvard in protest against the school’s failure to grant tenure to a black female professor. While acknowledging the likelihood that his protest would come to naught, Bell refused to back down, and for the next two years he spoke out against Harvard’s hiring practices, which, he charged, relied on “an insider-based network of colleagues at a few elitist institutions.” In 1992, citing a longstanding rule prohibiting faculty members from taking leave of their posts for more than two years, Harvard revoked Bell’s tenure on the law school’s faculty. While Bell was disappointed in the outcome of the conflict, he took consolation as he had in similar, earlier conflicts in the knowledge that he did what he believed to be right. “My life has been filled with hard cases that I seldom win,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times (July 1, 1992). “What frequently happens is that I lose the battles but I win the wars.”
Bell has written about race and the law in many articles, mainly for law journals, and several books, including Shades of Brown: New Perspectives on School Desegregation (1980) and Race, Racism and American Law (1973), which went on to become a standard law school textbook. Since the book first came out, two more editions of it have been published, the first in 1980 and the second in 1992. In an effort to make his ideas more accessible to the lay public, he has also written articles for The New York Times and other newspapers, and in recent years, he has tried his hand at fiction, in 1987 he published his first such work, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, which consists of a series of allegorical tales, or, in Bell’s word, “chronicles,” featuring Geneva Crenshaw, a fictitious civil rights lawyer-prophet. Each of the stories probes key events in American legal history for the reasons why racism, despite the best efforts of civil rights advocates over the course of three decades, continues to pervade American society.
As might be expected, given his predilection for activism, Bell’s ideas have occasionally compelled him to take stands that have put him at odds with Harvard’s administration and with other established institutions. During the 1970s, for instance, he often butted heads with the NAACP, which he publicly accused of placing more of a premium on integration than on quality education. Bell also stirred controversy while working at the University of Oregon Law School, where he became dean in 1981. Outraged by the school’s refusal to offer a tenure-track position to a female Asian-American lawyer whose appointment should have been routine, in 1985 he resigned his position. Bell became mired in a similar conflict at Harvard in 1987, when he organized a four day sit-in as a way of expressing his opposition to the administration’s refusal to grant tenure to two adherents of critical legal studies. Bell has contended that the administration’s decision was based on ideological grounds rather than on the qualifications of the two candidates. In his interview with Fox Butterfield, Bell reflected on his willingness to make personal sacrifices for the sake of combating racism: “History is made through confrontation. Nothing gets done without pushing.”
Bell launched what may turn out to be his most protracted protest on April 23, 1990, when he announced to Robert Clark, the dean of Harvard Law School, that he planned to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school added a tenured “woman of color” to the law faculty. At the time, the school had sixty tenured professors, of whom five were women and three were black; none was a black woman. Bell was convinced that only a woman of color could serve as a role model for women minority students. Notwithstanding the intensity of his convictions, Bell knew that this time he was playing for higher stakes than ever before: by making his return to Harvard conditional on a dramatic change in the university’s hiring practices, he was jeopardizing his tenure. Moreover, by agreeing to take an unpaid leave of absence, he was sacrificing his annual salary of about $120,000 at a time when his wife, Jewel, was dying of breast cancer. But Bell stood firm, explaining that, as a role model himself, he owed it to his students to be true to his principles. “I cannot continue to urge students to take risks for what they believe if I do not practice my own precepts,” he was quoted as saying in the New York Times (April 24, 1990).
Robert Clark responded to Bell’s action by stating that the university, like Bell, was committed to recruiting more minority professors but that it had not yet found a black female law professor qualified to teach at Harvard. “We do have high standards, and we aren’t going to compromise them,” Clark was quoted as saying in the New York Times (April 26, 1990). Bell found that argument utterly unsatisfactory. In a 1992 interview with Mary Jordan for the Washington Post (March 3, 1992), he presented the case that he had been arguing for the previous two years: “It is simply crazy, wrong, and insulting to say that none of the people in the small pool of black women professors are qualified to teach at Harvard. The merit argument is a smokescreen for [their] nepotism. It is a way of continuing a racist, sexist, homophobic tradition with words whose viciousness is cloaked by what appears to be an insistence on excellence.” Bell cited his own career as evidence that one does not need to have a degree from a top law school and a Supreme Court clerkship, which the Harvard law school requires of virtually all its tenured faculty members, in order to prosper at the university. “I would not have met their standards,” he said, according to the People article, “but I have had a successful career here.”
The reaction among Harvard’s faculty and student body to Bell’s move was divided. His protest drew public praise from many Harvard students, and nearly all of the students in his course on constitutional law demonstrated their support by writing a letter to the Boston Globe that stated, “We fully support his effort to wake up Dean Robert Clark and the hiring committee to the fact that this campus faces an educational crisis.” There were some students and a number of faculty members, however, who expressed uncertainty about the appropriateness of Bell’s tactics. “Many people feel what Derrick Bell is doing is dangerous,” the Harvard professor Clark Byse was quoted as saying in the New York Times (April 26, 1990). “If a person is just an affirmative action appointment, chosen because they happen to be black or female and may not be fully qualified, in the end they won’t get the respect of their students. To me, it’s more important to maintain Harvard’s standards of excellence than to improve the diversity of the faculty.”
During his interview with Andrea Sachs, Bell admitted that he had encountered the kind of disrespect Clark Byse referred to not only from students but also from faculty colleagues: “The most difficult thing about joining [Harvard’s] faculty was overcoming the presumption that lacking their credentials, a Harvard degree and a Supreme Court clerkship, I could never be in their league. In [the 1970s] there were black students who would not take my course because they couldn’t stand the possibility that I wouldn’t be good and that they could be embarrassed every day.” Unlike Byse and many of his colleagues, however, Bell did not conclude that affirmative action programs had no place at Harvard.
The stalemate between Harvard and Bell continued for two years, with Bell declining to either return or resign and the law school refusing to yield to pressure to grant tenure to a black female professor. Finally, on June 30, 1992, Harvard advised Bell that it considered his refusal to resume his responsibilities at Harvard a resignation and revoked his tenure. In an interview with a reporter for the Chicago Tribune (August 22, 1992), Bell reflected on the legacy of his protest: “If the measure is getting women of color on the law school faculty, it was not very successful. But I’m a teacher, and the most effective teaching is by example. If I can teach people, particularly lawyers, to take risks for what they believe in, then I have succeeded.”
Although Bell often found himself out of sync with Harvard’s administration, he was well-liked by the students and was, and continues to be, regarded as a role model for black law students throughout the nation. “He’s the best teacher I’ve had,” one Harvard student told Fox Butterfield, adding that the course he took with Bell was “the only one where students really get to participate and get feedback from the professor.” During Bell’s tenure at Harvard, moreover, a student guidebook consistently ranked him as one of the law school’s most popular professors. Bell’s effectiveness as an educator received formal recognition in 1985, when the Society of American Law Schools honored him with its Teacher of the Year Award.
Harvard’s repeal of Bell’s tenure coincided with the publication of Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), his second work of fiction, which, like And We Are Not Saved, consists of a series of fables featuring Geneva Crenshaw. The book’s thesis, however, is far grimmer than that of the earlier work. Indeed, the author goes so far as to challenge Martin Luther King’s vision represented in the words “We shall overcome.” “Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well,” Bell wrote in the book’s epigraph. “Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the book drew the ire of many conservatives. Abigail Thernstrom, for instance, who evaluated the book for the National Review (November 16, 1992), concluded that Bell must be “lost in a world of his own making, one in which paranoid delusions obscure the most obvious facts.” But Bell’s thesis also disturbed fellow civil rights advocates, such as Roger Wilkins, as well as other blacks, many of whom were inclined to believe that a black person’s prospects are better than they had been and are likely to improve. “You know, people get really mad at me,” Bell told Stephanie B. Goldberg. “In Washington, D.C., a well-dressed black woman came up to me and said, ‘How dare you discourage our young people and take away their hope?’ I told her that accepting racism as permanent is not putting up a white flag of surrender, but accepting the challenge of coming up with new ways to combat it. But I don’t think I really convinced her.”
After leaving Harvard in 1990, Bellcontinued not only to write but to teach as well. In the autumn of 1990, in a normally unused room on Harvard’s campus, he conducted a not-for-credit course on civil rights that was attended by twenty-two students. Since 1991, he was a visiting professor at New York University Law School.