Derrick Bell

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. lived from November 6, 1930 to October 5, 2011 and was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. He first worked for the U.S. Justice Department and then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi, before moving into academia, teaching first at the University of Southern California and then at Harvard Law School, where he became the first tenured African American professor of law in 1971. He was the first African American dean at the University of Oregon School of Law, serving from 1981 to 1985, and from 1991 until his death in 2011 he was a visiting professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law. Bell wrote many articles and books drawing on his practical legal experience and academic research to examine racism, particularly in the legal system, and questioned civil rights advocacy approaches partly out of frustrations from his own experience as a lawyer; he is often credited as one of the originators of critical race theory.