Thursday, October 6, 2011
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who worked to expose the persistence of racism in America, has died at age 80. Bell gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s minority hiring practices. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school (Oregon) that is not historically black. For his obituary, click here.
Professor Bell's pioneering work was Race, Racism, and American Law, which was published in its sixth edition in 2008. The Derrick Bell Reader, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, offers a capsule summary of Bell's many contributions, to race, civil rights, and Critical Race Theory.