Derrick A. Bell, Jr.

Derrick A. Bell, Jr. was a legal scholar, author, and advocate for racial equality. He was the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School and his work was instrumental in the development of critical race theory. He attended Duquesne University (B.A., 1952) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law (LL.B., 1957), where he was the only Black graduate in his class. After two years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, he served for two years as a staff attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice. He resigned from that position in 1959 because the department asked him to withdraw his NAACP membership. Thurgood Marshall recruited Bell to serve as assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and from 1960 to 1966 he administered three hundred desegregation cases regarding schools and restaurants in the South. Bell became Deputy Director of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1966. He left government service in 1968 for academia, teaching at UCLA’s Western Center on Law and Poverty, Harvard Law School, and the University of Oregon Law School. In 1985, Bell resigned from his post at Oregon to protest the University’s refusal to offer a faculty position to a woman of color. He returned to Harvard in 1986. Again protesting the lack of diversity of the Law School faculty, he took a visiting professorship at New York University in 1991.

Bell’s fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, and in several university legal journals. Among his best-selling books are And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987), Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), and Race, Racism and American Law (1973). Bell developed 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.