R.I.P.Professor Derrick Bell

[malaise]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/us/derrick-bell-pioneering-harvard-law-professor-dies-at-80.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
<snip>
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who saw persistent racism in America and sought to expose it through books, articles and provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.

The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, said.

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that was not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

While he was working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in his 20s, his superiors told him to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., believing it posed a conflict of interest. Instead he quit the department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change it from within.

Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his first wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, had asked him, “Why does it always have to be you?” The question trailed him afterward, he wrote in a 2002 memoir, “Ethical Ambition,” as did another posed by unsympathetic colleagues: “Who do you think you are?”
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Derrick Bell - a pioneer and aman with convictions

[midnight]

1. We need more like him....

[malaise]

2. Absolutely and not only in the US

:hi:

[leveymg]

3. Principles first - practical politics will follow. But, politics w/out principles fail.

The PTB in DC could learn a lot from Prof. Bell.

[malaise]

5. Absolutely

:fistbump:

[City Lights]

8. Exactly! eom

[Supersedeas]

9. He was a true exemplar of this approach

[Blue_Tires]

4. kick

[City Lights]

6. RIP, Mr. Bell.

:patriot:

Rec'd.

[malaise]

7. From the article

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to redress past injustices. His 1973 book, “Race, Racism and American Law,” became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.

Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday.

At a rally while a student at Harvard Law, Barack Obama compared Professor Bell to the civil rights hero Rosa Parks.

[TBF]

10. Recommend. nt

[in_cog_ni_to]

11. RIP, Professor Bell.

May his memory be a blessing.

A man with a conscience. Too few of those around. :(