American Racial and Legal History According to Derrick Bell

Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Gilmore, Brian

American Racial and Legal History According to Derrick Bell The Derrick Bell Reader Edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (New York University Press, $24)

Someday, Derrick Bell, the first tenured African American law professor at Harvard Law School, will be compared to the legendary race man James Weldon Johnson. Like Johnson, Bell worked for the NAACP and spent an ambivalent period working in the federal government (Bell at the Department of Justice; Johnson as a diplomat during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson). Both men were trained as lawyers, and both spent time teaching during their lives.

Yet the most important similarity between the men is that both used their skills to make lasting contributions to the African American artistic tradition in the struggle for equal justice in the United States.

Johnson, an accomplished poet and composer, provided his Black brethren with the lyrics to their national anthem "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (Johnson's brother, John R. Johnson wrote the music). In 1912, Johnson also published one of the great novels of the early 20th century The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

Bell's key contribution to African American arts is his unique writings on American racial history and politics. Beginning in 1987 with his first collection of speculative writing on race and the law, And We Are Not Saved, Bell single-handedly deconstructed the racial dialogue between Blacks and Whites in America.

The overall premise in his writings is poignant: Whites collectively have always acted in America to maintain their status of superiority over Blacks, and everything from the Constitution to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954 is evidence of their abiding quest.

For those who agree, or disagree, with Bell's radical departure from accepted racial notions, The Derrick Bell Reader offers plenty to dissect. The book could not have arrived at a better time. This is, in effect, Bell's manifesto on the race problem in America from a variety of constructs. The great legal riffs Bell has amassed over the years in law journals and in his books from 1972 to 2004 are here for examination. The editors, husband-and-wife legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, have done a fabulous job.

The reader is allowed to enter the heart and soul of Bell, a civil rights champion who clearly could not stomach the failure of the post-civil rights era. Consider the following passage from the book: "Black people will never gain full equality in this country," Bell writes in "Racism is Here To Stay" first published in the Howard University School of Law's journal in 1991. "Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance."

Or this literary warhead, found in an essay by Bell called "Wanted" published in 2000 in the UC Davis Law Review: "What we need is a white leader who is both able to be heard and is courageous enough to deliver a three-point message about race." Bell, despite his urgent call for "new White leadership," is not likely holding his breath on this one.

Of course, most readers will be drawn to the writings that Bell is most famous for, the speculative work found in his best-selling books And We Are Not Saved, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and Gospel Choirs.

The Derrick Bell Reader begins with one of his most famous writings, "The Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction," from And We Are Not Saved. In this narrative, Bell's legendary legal time traveler and rhetorical genius, Geneva Crenshaw, journeys back to 1787, when the U.S. Constitution is being drafted. Using Geneva to demonstrate that the United States was completely off track on race issues from the very beginning, this chronicle, according to the editors, serves as an "entry point for Bell's work." It indeed sets the tone.

There are unexpected gems as well. Bell's April 9, 1990, letter to Harvard Law School Dean Robert Clark announcing that he intended to request leave without pay "until a woman of color is offered and accepts a tenured position on this faculty " is included here. Also present is a very intriguing essay on Thurgood Marshall written after the Supreme Court justice's death in 1993.

There is something for everyone here. Law professors seeking ideas for teaching will be drawn to the section called "Pedagogy;" sociologists will find interest in the section entitled "Racism as Meaness" and those who never believed in a civil rights agenda will be drawn to Bell's work compiled in the section called "Nationalism, Separatism and Self Help."

Most of all, however, Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer, educator and activist, will take his deserved place in the world of American intellectuals with the arrival of The Derrick Bell Reader. His tireless advocacy, through his artful writings, is sweet music to the struggle for racial change in America.