Professor Derrick Bell

By Anjana Samant, who works as counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights

Professor Derrick Bell.  Say his name and many will remember him as the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School who left in protest over the institution’s failure to hire women of color for the faculty.  Or they will remember him as a prolific writer who, in books such as And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well, indicted the legal “victories” of the civil rights movement (including those that he himself had championed) for creating false hope and failing to live up to their promise.  Others will recall Professor Bell as the ground-breaking academic whose legal scholarship gave rise to critical race theory, a movement that used “the first person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity” to question whether colorblindness and liberal anti-discrimination principles could ever eradicate racism and inequality.

Ask any of the hundreds of students and colleagues with whom Professor Bell worked, and they will tell you he was all this and much more.  Professor Bell was a courageous, principled, and inspiring figure.  And yet for all the acclaim (and derision) he garnered, he also was consummately human.  Professor Bell was humble, soft-spoken, loving, and openly self-critical – in many ways, the antithesis of what one would expect of an esteemed legal academic.

I first came to know Professor Bell as his student during my second and third years of law school, then while working at his side as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow from 2001 to 2002, and in the years since, as former student, mentee, and, dare I say, friend.  Teaching – and learning – were two of Professor Bell’s greatest passions and he pursued them at every turn, not just within the confines of the classroom.  He spent as much time sharing wisdom gained from his professional career, life experience, and careful self-reflection as he did gleaning insight from the perspectives and queries of his students.  Humility was valued and encouraged, not through lecture and preaching but by way of example.  Looking back at his work in school desegregation, Professor Bell wrote, “I continued my work in school desegregation, but with a growing sense that the symbolic value of eliminating dual school systems was not equaled by substantive educational benefits for our clients, or the millions of people they symbolically represented.  I had been humbled by reality, and while at first I worried that this was a flaw in the idealism I needed to do this work, I soon understood that humility is a crucial kind of strength.”