Law, General

Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester

Name: Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester
Author: Derrick A. Bell
ISBN: 9780807009260

by Derrick A. Bell

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About the Author, Derrick A. Bell

Derrick Bell

A foremost legal and social thinker, Derrick Bell began challenging conventions with his now classic text Race, Racism and American Law. In his fictional allegorical stories and stimulating essays, Bell explores the fault lines in our social fabric and ways to repair them.

Biography

Renowned as the professor who gave up his tenured position at the Harvard Law School in protest of the university's lack of minority women faculty members, Derrick Bell is also an innovative, insightful and unorthodox scholar and writer. Bell, now a professor at New York University's School of Law, helped pioneer a new style of narrative scholarship, mixing allegory and anecdote together with analysis and fact.

Bell was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, where he was the first member of his family to go to college. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Korea, he entered the University of Pittsburgh Law School with the goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer. He began his legal career at the Justice Department, then was recruited by Thurgood Marshall to join the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the NAACP. In 1971, Bell became the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School.

Bell published Race, Racism and American Law, now a standard law school text, in 1973. Its critique of traditional civil rights legislation helped spark the academic movement toward critical race theory, in which scholars such as Richard Delgado, Kimberle Crenshaw and Kendall Thomas sought new paradigms for understanding and addressing racial injustice. The book's fourth edition appeared in 2000.

As a writer, Bell is best known for his series of books featuring the fictional civil rights leader Geneva Crenshaw. The books, which include And We Are Not Saved, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Gospel Choirs, and Afrolantica Legacies, interweave fables and philosophical dialogues with Bell's analyses of legal history. "I suppose there would be a problem if everyone wrote about race in the Derrick Bell style," Jeremy Waldron wrote in a New York Times review of Gospel Choirs. "We need analysis and we need social science as much as dream, dialogue and narrative. But we would certainly be the poorer if no one wrote like this; for even to be disconcerted by Mr. Bell's technique is to open oneself to the challenge of his thesis and the soaring power of the music that sustains it."

At the age of 70, after a lifetime of passionate commitment to social justice, Bell wrote Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. The book draws on the lives of role models like Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson, and Medgar Evers, as well as on Bell's own life, to explore what it means to live and work with integrity, dignity and compassion. "We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained," Bell writes. His own accomplishments are an inspiration to the brave souls willing to buck that system.

Good To Know

Bell gave up his tenured position at Harvard Law School in 1992, when he refused to return from the two-year, unpaid leave of absence he took to protest the school's failure to hire and tenure minority women.

Bell had launched a similar protest before, while serving as dean of the Oregon Law School. He resigned his Oregon position in 1985 after the faculty directed that he not extend an offer to an Asian-American faculty candidate who was third on the list for a faculty position. When the top two candidates (both white males) declined the position, the law faculty decided to reopen the search rather than hire the Asian-American woman.

In 1994, the story "Space Traders" from Bell's book Faces at the Bottom of the Well was made into an HBO movie starring Robert Guillaume.

President Barack Obama was a student of Bell's at Harvard Law School.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The first black professor tenured at Harvard Law School, Bell (Faces at the Bottom of the Well) lost his job in 1992 after protesting-by taking an unpaid leave of absence-the school's failure to hire and tenure a woman of color. Reflecting first on his youth and career as a civil rights laywer, Bell offers a candid tale of infighting at Harvard Law. The school, he argues persuasively, places more emphasis on paper credentials than proven skills, thus limiting faculty diversity of race, sex and class. During his first year of protest, Bell agreed to teach a seminar at Harvard for free; in his second year, he was a visiting teacher at New York University Law School, where he remains. He describes how warring ideological factions defeated the appointment of a black woman candidate at Harvard Law. The officials there refused to waive a rule limiting faculty leaves to two years, and Bell was fired as he began his third year of protest. While a few observations here ring false-do students really not protest poor teaching by white professors?-Bell raises important questions about institutional racism and offers resonant thoughts on the tradition of protest and its importance to self-esteem. 25,000 first printing; author tour. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Bell provides a detailed account of the events that led him to give up his position as a Harvard Law School professor to protest the school's never having granted tenure to a minority woman. (LJ 9/15/94)

Roland Wulbert

Bell, the first tenured black in Harvard history, protested Harvard Law School's hiring policies and was fired for his pains. But those expecting either recrimination or a mercilessly logical legal brief from him may be surprised and perhaps puzzled. Bell prefaces each chapter with an episode in the conflict between the Citadel and the lowlanders--a fable of race relations in America, to be sure, but also something more, as is the nonfictional body of the book. To some extent, Bell's protest is an excuse to disclose behind-the-scenes social relations at Harvard Law, and the thematic sections are more literary meditation on protest than an exhortation to take sides. For Bell, "protest" means solitary action closer to ethics than the committee meetings and chains of command of political organizations, and the moral ambivalence involved in protest is a theme to which he always returns. Bell urges us to follow his lead but reminds us that good guys find themselves unemployed and that when virtue is its own reward, it may be no reward at all.