Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell is a compelling voice on issues of race and class in this society. Throughout his 40-year career as a lawyer, activist, teacher, and writer, he has provoked his critics and challenged his readers with his uncompromising candor and original progressive views. Bell became the first tenured black professor at the Harvard Law School in 1971. He relinquished it in 1992, when he refused to return from a two-year, unpaid leave of absence he took to protest the lack of women of color on the faculty.

Professor Bell is not a newcomer to personal protests of this nature. In 1980, he left Harvard for five years to accept the deanship at the Oregon Law School. Bell left the post in Oregon when the faculty directed that he not extend an offer to an Asian American woman faculty candidate who, after an extended search, had been listed third on the list. When the top two candidates (both white males) declined the position, the faculty decided to reopen the search rather than extend an offer to the Asian American woman.

Books by Derrick Bell

• Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
• And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice
• Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
• Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad
• Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (Critical America Series)
• Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence
• Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home
• Race, Racism, and American Law
• Constitutional Conflicts: 1997-98 Edition
• Afrolantica Legacies
• Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester