Professor Derrick Bell, Visiting Professor at New York University, has passed. Bell's legacy in the law is long and deep. Bell never trained professionally as a historian; yet his scholarship reflected great historical consciousness and insight. It's fair to say, I think, that every historian of the civil rights era and every scholar of race and the law who followed him is indebted to Professor Bell. Here are some excerpts from Bell's New York Times obit. Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who worked to expose the persistence of racism in America through his books and articles and his provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in New York. Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that is not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.
Addressing law students grappling with career decisions, he extolled what he called “a life of meaning and worth,” even though, he wrote, he sometimes alienated associates who saw his actions as “futile and foolish.” ...
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 the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday. At a rally while a student at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama compared Professor Bell to the civil rights hero Rosa Parks.
For examples of Bell's scholarship, see The Derrick Bell Reader (2005), Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2005), And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1989), and Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth.
