Derrick Bell: Critical Race Theory Scholar and Law Professor

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was a lawyer, law professor, and legal scholar best known for his legal advocacy as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and skepticism regarding the limits of the Civil Rights Movement and the possibilities of substantive racial justice generally.

His often contrarian views and the challenges he posed to liberal notions of social justice made him a foundational figure in what became critical race theory.

Derrick Bell’s professional and intellectual journey paradoxically put him on both sides of questions regarding racial reform in America.

• Education: Following his graduation from Duquesne University and a brief term in the Air Force, Bell attended the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, graduating in 1957. Thurgood Marshall’s arguments to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ultimately inspired Bell to become a lawyer.
• NAACP Legal Defense Fund: After leaving the civil rights division of the Justice Department due to a conflict of interest, Bell began arguing cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (now known as the Legal Defense and Educational Fund) in 1960. As a civil rights lawyer, he participated in or supervised many cases regarding desegregating the South.
• Professorship: In 1966, Bell became a professor of law at the University of Southern California. He soon left to teach at Harvard Law School, where he became the school’s first Black tenured professor. In 1980, Bell briefly served as the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law (the first Black professor to hold the job) but quit when the school refused to hire an Asian American candidate for a teaching position. He returned to teach at Harvard.
• Leave of absence: In 1990, Bell took an unpaid leave of absence from Harvard to protest their hiring practices. (The school had failed to give tenure to any women of color that year.) He started teaching at the New York University School of Law as a visiting professor and remained at the school until he died in 2011.

Critical race theory (CRT) as a school of legal thought grew out of critical legal studies (CLS), a movement examining how the legal system, rather than acting as an impartial arbiter of justice, served to uphold existing power structures. Bell’s thinking and writing heavily influenced critical race theorists, like Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, when it came to tackling similar topics from the perspective of race and racial inequality.

Bell’s own advocacy experience, as well as his observations of the ways civil rights cases worked out in practice—especially affirmative action and school desegregation cases—made him pessimistic about whether American society could ever achieve racial equality. Dovetailing with the ideas circulating in CLS groups, Bell believed in the permanence of racism and the persistence of white supremacy, due primarily to what he referred to as the interest-convergence dilemma. Through the interest-convergence dilemma, Bell posited that racial progress for nonwhite people in the United States was only possible if the goals of the racial justice movement were the same as those of the white-dominated power structure.

Bell produced some of his most incendiary work between 1970 and 1980 but published for most of his career. Here are some of his notable works:

1. 1. Race, Racism and American Law (1970): In this seminal book, Bell argued that large-scale racial injustices were only rectified when the solutions aligned with white priorities and goals.
2. 2. “Serving Two Masters” (1976): In the Yale Law Journal, Bell put forth the idea that racial justice advocacy groups couldn’t be as effective as they hoped to be, caught between their own agenda and the wants and needs of their clients.
3. 3. “Brown vs. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma” (1980): In the Harvard Law Review, Bell countered the notion that the Civil Rights Movement had been successful by convincing white people of Black people’s humanity. Instead, Bell suggested that racial reform served the United States to improve its image and relations on the international stage during the Cold War.
4. 4. Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992): In this short story collection, Bell took on issues of race by viewing them through the eyes of a fictitious civil rights attorney named Geneva Crenshaw. In his most famous story, “The Space Traders,” aliens offer to fix the United States’s problems if it hands over all of its Black people.
5. 5. Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (2002): In his memoir, Bell extolled the virtues of sticking to one’s principles even while pursuing material success.
6. 6. Silent Covenants (2004): Bell questioned the legacy of integration in the context of Brown v. Board of Education, even writing an alternate opinion that endorsed school segregation.

There’s a lot of information that history textbooks don’t cover, including the ways in which systems of inequality continue to impact everyday life. With the MasterClass Annual Membership, get access to exclusive lessons from Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West, Jelani Cobb, John McWhorter, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Sherrilyn Ifill to learn about the forces that have influenced race in the United States.