Derrick Bell oversaw some three hundred school-desegregation cases in Mississippi as a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, working under Thurgood Marshall. Bell was born in Pittsburgh on November 6, 1930, the first member of his family to attend college; a scholarship to Lincoln University fell through for lack of aid, so he studied at Duquesne University, graduating in 1952. He served in the Air Force in Korea, then earned his law degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 1957.
The Justice Department hired him after law school, but he left in 1959 when the department told him to end his NAACP membership. Marshall recruited him to the Legal Defense Fund, where he litigated school cases across the South. In 1966, he became deputy director of civil rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, administering Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and contributing to the 1968 school-desegregation guidelines. A year later he moved into legal teaching at the University of Southern California, where he also directed its Western Center on Law and Poverty.
In 1971, Bell became the first African American tenured professor at Harvard Law School, where he established a civil-rights course and wrote Race, Racism and American Law, the casebook that became a standard text in law schools. He helped shape the school of thought known as critical race theory, and his interest-convergence thesis, which holds that gains for Black Americans tend to come when they align with the interests of white Americans, remains a subject of debate among scholars. He pushed law schools to broaden representation in faculty hiring.
Bell left Harvard to become the first African American dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, and he resigned in 1985 after the university directed him not to hire an Asian American candidate for a faculty position. Returning to Harvard, he resigned again in 1992 over the school's failure to hire and grant tenure to minority women, and he moved to NYU. His interests reached beyond legal analysis: Bell wrote fiction and autobiography, including books built around the fictional lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, explored race through music, and introduced an annual gospel choir concert at NYU Law. He died on October 5, 2011, at 80.
