Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist.

Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.

[6] In 1960, Bell married Jewel Hairston who was also a Civil Rights activist and educator and they would go on to have three sons: Derrick, Douglas, and Carter.

At the LDF, he worked alongside other prominent civil-rights attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, and Constance Baker Motley.

[13] While working at the LDF, Bell supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases[14] and spearheaded the fight of James Meredith to secure admission to the University of Mississippi, over the protests of Governor Ross Barnett.

Later, as an academic, these practical results led him to conclude that "racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.

During this time, he worked at a number of law schools while authoring books which are now considered the foundation of critical race theory.

Among his notable cases was a class action suit against the Los Angeles Police Department on behalf of the city's Black residents.

During Bell's directorship, the Western Center's work was recognized in 1971 with a trophy bestowed by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California.

He resigned from his position at Harvard in protest of the school's hiring procedures, specifically the absence of women of color on the staff.

Later, Bell's tenure was interrupted by his resignation following a protest, due to the university's refusal to hire an Asian-American candidate he had chosen for a faculty position.

After his two-year leave of absence, his position at Harvard ended and he remained at NYU where he continued to write and lecture on issues of race and civil rights.

He related these issues to music in a book of parables and introduced the Bell Annual Gospel Choir Concert, which is a tradition at the school today.

[19] During his time at NYU Law, Bell supported a student organization who were demanding the university hire more faculty of color.

[20] During the summer of 1981, under the auspices of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bell conducted a multi-week seminar in Race Relations Law for 14 lawyers and judges from across Oregon.

[5] The sit-in was widely supported by students, but divided the faculty, as Harvard administrators claimed the professors were denied tenure for substandard scholarship and teaching.

[16][23] Students supported the move which critics found "counterproductive," while Harvard administrators cited a lack of qualified candidates, defending that they had taken great strides in the previous decade to bring in Black faculty members.

Opposing Harvard Law faculty called him "a media manipulator who unfairly attacked the school," noting that other people had accused him of "depriv[ing] students of an education while he makes money on the lecture circuit.

After two years, Harvard had still not hired any minority women, and Bell requested an extension of his leave, which the school refused, thereby ending his tenure.

[5][25] In March 2012, five months after his death, Bell became the target of conservative media, including Breitbart and Sean Hannity, in an exposé of President Barack Obama.

[27] In 1970, Bell published Race, Racism, and American Law, a textbook of more than a thousand pages containing the idea that racial progress would be achieved only when it aligned with white people's interests.

[citation needed] Bell's critique represented a challenge to the dominant liberal and conservative position on civil rights, race and the law.

During the 70s, Bell studied and wrote about the effects of desegregation noting that this decision was not due to a moral shift in nature, but rather because of the "convergence" of efforts in dismantling Jim Crow laws and racial segregation.

Additionally, it had to do with the concern of the white elite that the United States would lose the battle to communism, and tarnish their reputation and global influence.

[29][11] The injustices initially set by segregation were not undone but, instead created new issues for Black students at predominantly white institutions.

His early work on education contributed to his creation of critical race theory, alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alan Freeman, Cheryl Harris, Patricia J. Williams, Charles R. Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Richard Delgado.

According to Bell, his purpose in writing was to examine the racial issues within the context of their economic and social, and political dimensions from a legal standpoint.

[36] Along with Bell's contributions to critical race theory, in his early articles, he exhibited multiple analyses' of legal doctrine.

[37] In his narrative stories, he would create hypothetical legal doctrines that put forth the idea that racism is a permanent neutral principle.

They discuss Bell's teachings of racism in America and explore the future of race relations and racial justice in the United States.