Derrick Bell: A career of confrontation opens doors for others

New Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 1998 by Pyatt, Richard

Mention Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, or the top-gun intellectuals-"Skip" Gates, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson-and barber shop pundits will stand and deliver like talk radio show hosts. Say "Derrick Bell," you might get dead air and a blank stare.

Yet this visiting professor at New York University Law School is as stubborn a civil rights activist and social theorist as those better known people. Now nearing 70, Derrick Bell has consistently put principle above position, even positions rewarding enough to make people avoid confrontation in favor of being "politically mature" and "making change from within."

Bell first put his career on the line more than three decades ago. In 1959 he was a rising, thirty-year-old attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. It had taken an introduction to then associate attorney general William Rogers for Bell to get the job, his first out of law school. Yet he quit rather than comply with Justice's demand that he surrender his NAACP membership.

Bell worked at various tasks for the NAACP under the direction of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. While Bell was counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he put something dearer than career on the line when he refused to leave the "white" waiting room of a Jackson, Mississippi, train station in the early 1960s. Fortunately he was only arrested and forced to spend a night in jail.

The principled stand that made Bell a public figure was his resignation from Harvard Law School because it refused to appoint a black woman professor.

Harvard Law had no black people on its faculty prior to 1969, although there were numerous black graduates. By the end of the 1960s, the demand for democratic institutions, and the affirmative action to make them so, was national and undeniable. "We gotta straighten out our act," Bell paraphrases the thinking of the powers at Harvard. "So they hired me to make them look good."

Bell, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh Law School, had been rejected twice by Harvard, apparently for not having ivy league credentials. But in 1969 he was invited aboard and in 1971 was tenured. "Okay, I'll be the first, but I don't want to be the last," Bell says he stated at the time he was hired. "The whole time I was there, it was a struggle to get them to move at all," he recalls now.

When twenty years had elapsed and still no woman of color graced the law faculty, Bell told Harvard he was taking a leave of absence and wouldn't return until a woman of color was hired. Law school dean Robert Clark reportedly told him, "This is Harvard Law School, not some lunch counter in the South." Bell's leave of absence became an expulsion.

During this period Bell lost a much valued wife, Jewel, his companion of thirty years and mother of their three sons, now ages 35, 34, and 32. Her death was preceded by illness that depleted her husband financially and spiritually. To make things worse, Regina Austin, the visiting African American woman professor whose permanent appointment Bell had championed to no avail, was reportedly angry and resentful at being his cause celebre.

It's said that she didn't speak to him for a considerable time after the controversy. (She is now on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.)

Bell knew that his strategy of resigning from Harvard-called foolhardy and reckless by some-would put pressure on Harvard Law to hire a black woman.

The university has now very publicly added to its faculty U.S. Attorney General nominee Lani Guinier. "Harvard is simply taking credit for something that it should have done a long time ago," Bell says.

Author Patricia Williams is a Columbia University law professor who appreciates Bell's trailblazing. "Derrick was the most important mentor in legal education for years because he was the only black man, for one thing. He took everyone seriously, especially black women, which was rare."

He attributes his empathy with women to not being able to dance, or deliver the raps that made cheerleaders swoon, when he was a teenager. He made friends with young women who were, like himself, on the fringes, holding up the wall. As a result, he says, he discovered that women are people, "not sex objects"-variegated, struggling, capable people-and he empathizes with many of the women he encounters as his students and colleagues. "From all my years of teaching I have lots of adopted daughters," Bell says. "My wife sometimes asked me, `Don't you have any men students?"'

Bell had left Harvard once before. In 1980 he took a deanship at the University of Oregon's law school. True to his form, he was out of there as of 1985, resigned because he was directed not to appoint an Asian-American faculty candidate. Bell was asked to return to Harvard. He did so, and the rest is protest history.

Bell's career of protest resignations draws criticism from some people as being "merely symbolic." Columbia University professor Manning Marable rebuts that. "His efforts are flash points in a larger, longer struggle for racial equality," Marable says of Bell's lonely witnessing. "They are symbolic in meaning, but you have to remember that symbols are very important."