Ethical Ambition

From the New York Times bestselling author Derrick Bell, a profound meditation on achieving success with integrity.

As one of the country's most influential law professors, Derrick Bell has spent a lifetime helping students struggling to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of an overwhelming pressure to succeed at any price. Frequently asked how he managed to be so extraordinarily successful while never giving up the fight for justice and equality, Bell decided to spend his seventieth year writing a book of insight and guidance. The result, Ethical Ambition, is a deeply affecting, uplifting, and brilliant series of meditations that not only challenges us to face some of the most difficult questions that life presents, but dares to offer some solutions.

Using incidents from his own life, Bell also looks to literature, history, and other contemporary figures who have refused to compromise their beliefs. In chapters that explore passion, faith courage, inspiration, humility, and relationships, Ethical Ambition address the most fundamental issues of life.

Derrick Bell is an internationally recognized legal scholar, civil rights activist, and writer. He currently teaches at New York University School of Law, and is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Faces at the Bottom of the Well.

As one of the country's most influential law professors, Bell has spent a lifetime helping students struggling to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of an overwhelming pressure to succeed at any price. Frequently asked how he managed to be so extraordinarily successful while never giving up the fight for justice and equality, Bell decided to spend his seventieth year writing a book of insight and guidance. The result, Ethical Ambition, is a series of meditations that not only challenges us to face some of the most difficult questions that life presents, but dares to offer some solutions.

Using incidents from his own life, Bell also looks to literature, history, and contemporary society for other figures who have refused to compromise their beliefs. In chapters that explore passion, faith courage, inspiration, humility, and relationships, Ethical Ambition addresses the most fundamental issues of life.

"Ethical Ambition is an immensely stirring work that speaks directly to the daunting challenge faced by thousands of people who are torn between the dictates of their conscience and the practical realities of a remorselessly and often brutally competitive society. Seldom has the self-sustaining passion of a life lived boldly, but with self-examining humility, been so courageously and honestly conveyed. A generation thirsting for a life of meaning in an age of market-driven anomie will be profoundly grateful to the author for the lessons he has drawn out of a long career of activist integrity within the ever-uncompleted work of justice."—Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities

"Ethical Ambition is an immensely stirring work that speaks directly to the daunting challenge faced by thousands of people who are torn between the dictates of their conscience and the practical realities of a remorselessly and often brutally competitive society. Seldom has the self-sustaining passion of a life lived boldly, but with self-examining humility, been so courageously and honestly conveyed. A generation thirsting for a life of meaning in an age of market-driven anomie will be profoundly grateful to the author for the lessons he has drawn out of a long career of activist integrity within the ever-uncompleted work of justice."—Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities

"Derrick Bell's Ethical Ambition carefully lays out the possibility of both being successful and living by one's core values, one's ethical convictions. Bell is the ultimate teacher, a mentor to all of us."—Anna Deavere Smith, actor and playwright

"Derrick Bell is one of the great race men in America, but his intellectual range, moral passion, and the literary gifts transcend the chains of any one people and belong to us all. He is a gift to the nation, and so too are all his works. His voice is a clear trumpet amidst the noise."—Peter J. Gomes, minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard and author of The Good Book and The Good Life

"Derrick Bell's Ethical Ambition is a concise, beautifully written guide to the true good life, written by a man of true principles and morals."—James McBride, author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna

"Ethical Ambition moved me to tears and then to action. Derrick Bell writes with passion and beauty—rarely the gift of one so scholarly. This new work is the treasure I've been waiting for."—Susan L. Taylor, editorial director, Essence magazine,
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"Ethical Ambition is an inspirational Baedeker, a guide to translating one's convictions into action in everyday life, and a reminder not to mistake athletic or self-centered risk-taking with true courage. If everyone could live as ethically and passionately as Derrick Bell, humanity would take an evolutionary leap forward."—Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and Getting Over Getting Older

"Bell shares his experiences of living an ethical life in the crucible of conflict, discrimination and protest. Bell notably walked away from a tenured position at Harvard Law School to protest the lack of minority women faculty members (he is now a visiting professor at NYU). When many asked how he could give up such a successful position, Bell responded that material success could not satisfy his desire to succeed ethically by pointing out the inequities of the system. Bell contends that religious faith and his religious community have provided the foundations for his desire to live an ethical life, and he urges those who would live with moral integrity to explore a variety of faiths. He stresses the importance of commitment in relationships, as well as the necessity of humility in serving others. Finally, he discusses a series of 'ethical inspirations' ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Paul Robeson to Medgar Evers and Daniel Ellsberg. Bell's noble aspirations to lead a life of ethical ambition may inspire others."—Publishers Weekly

Derrick Bell is an internationally recognized legal scholar, civil rights activist, and writer. He currently teaches at New York University School of Law, and is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller Faces at the Bottom of the Well.

Biography

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 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.