Derrick Bell

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.

Bell was born on November 6, 1930, to Derrick Albert and Ada Elizabeth Childress Bell.

He was raised in a working-class family in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He was raised a Presbyterian.

Bell's maternal grandfather, John Childress, was a blind cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

His paternal grandfather was a minister in Dothan, Alabama.

Bell attended Schenley High School and was the first member of his family to go to college.

He was offered a scholarship to Lincoln University but could not attend due to a lack of financial aid, choosing to attend Duquesne University instead.

There, he was a member of the college's Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1952.

He then served as an officer for the United States Air Force for two years, one of which he spent in Korea.

In 1957, he received a LL.B. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law where he was the only Black graduate of his class.

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.

In 1960, Bell married Jewel Hairston who was also a Civil Rights activist and educator and they would go on to have three sons: Derrick, Douglas, and Carter.

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 and spearheaded the fight of James Meredith to secure admission to the University of Mississippi, over the protests of Governor Ross Barnett.

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."

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.

They were married until Jewel died in 1990.

He later married Janet Dewart.

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.

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.