Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (1930-2011) was an American lawyer, writer, civil rights advocate, and educator from Pittsburg, PA, most widely known as an originator of critical race theory, and as the first tenured African-American professor of law at Harvard Law School. Bell received degrees from Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburg, then worked as an assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund where he endeavored to undo racist laws and segregation in schools. While working in Mississippi, Bell supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases, before he was appointed to the law faculty at the University of Southern California as the executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty. Bell also worked as a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law, and as a dean at the University of Oregon School of Law. Bell published several works in his lifetime, including Race, Racism, and American Law (1973 and 2008), Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004), Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (2002), and And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987).
Derrick Bell
Studios
New Jersey
Derrick Bell worked in the New Jersey studio.
The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…