Derrick Bell on law and literature

Crisis Forum

books

When Derrick Bell published a fascinating collection of allegorical narratives (part fiction. part legal analysis) entitled And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice in 1987, the civil rights lawyer and legal scholar launched a new era in Black writing. Described by novelist Alice Walker as "a book of compelling originality," And We Are Not Saved and its sequels - Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home and Afrolantica Legacies - changed the way Black lawyers were viewed along America's cultural landscape.

Today, many other African Americans with impressive legal backgrounds Stephen L. Carter, Patricia Elam, Patricia Williams and Randall Kennedy - have become successful authors. Bell, humble and reserved, takes no credit for the rise of the Black lawyer as writer.

"It is just a natural outgrowth of the success of Black lawyers," he says.

Bell, 72, has been a visiting professor at New York University School of Law for a dozen years. He continues to write and has no plans to retire from teaching. And if the subject matter of his latest effort, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (Bloomsbury), is any indication, he remains on the cutting edge of today's important issues. Beginning with the opening words of the book - "How can I maintain my integrity while seeking success?" - Bell meditates eloquently on the issue of professional ethical conduct.

Bell admits that he has "never ceased grappling with" that question and knows that today's law graduates, burdened with increasingly high levels of student loan debt, deal with it as well. This is precisely why Bell describes toiling in the legal profession as one of the "most unhappiest" endeavors one could choose and insists that the work will never be satisfying unless one is "passionate" about the law.

"If you really want to be happy, you should seek out work that you would do if they were paying you nothing," he says.

A zeal for the law is easy for Bell to write about, because his career has been nothing short of remarkable. This despite the fact that he came along at a time when he says, "there was nothing" for Black law school graduates.

In 1960, Bell was hired by Thurgood Marshall to work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York. There, Bell worked with the future U.S. Supreme Court justice and other legal legends such as Constance Baker Motley, Jack Greenberg and Robert L. Carter. He describes this time as "some of the most exciting years of the Civil Rights Movement."

In 1969, Bell was offered a position as a full-time professor at Harvard Law School. He was, in fact, the first Black full-time professor in the 150-year history of the school and would eventually become the school's first tenured Black law professor.

After nearly 20 years at Harvard Law School, Bell forfeited his teaching position in protest over the school's refusal to hire a woman of color as a tenured professor. (Bell took a leave of absence without pay and was fired in 1992 when he refused to return.) That protest goes to the heart of Bell's enduring message in Ethical Ambition.

"Leaving jobs and engaging in other activities to protest what I felt was wrong did not destroy my career," Bell writes. He adds that the actions he has taken over the years have "enriched" his life and provided him with an "unrealistic but no less satisfying sense that I was doing God's work."

In addition to his principled actions, Bell has become even better known over the years for his willingness to assert his opinion on a variety of political and social matters. Bell says that "the new frontier in civil rights is not law" and he doesn't think Blacks should keep filing lawsuits as a strategy for overcoming discrimination. Litigation becomes all about the lawyers and pushes victims to the sidelines of the process. Bell believes a better approach is to increase local organizing efforts and for civil rights lawyers to provide legal counsel to local leaders, enabling communities to retain control over their struggles.

His most passionate comments come forth during discussions of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. "Brown, like every civil rights policy, I don't care what is the source, was for Whites," Bell says, adding that no civil rights policy, including the Emancipation Proclamation, has ever been enacted in America unless those Whites in policymaking positions believed it was in their best interests.

The fact that Blacks were not calling for desegregation or integration; but rather simply seeking quality "education" was lost in the fight to end segregation in the public schools, Bell insists, noting that this lost ideal is likely to be revisited by African Americans in the 21st century.

Bell actually had aspirations to be a writer before he even considered becoming a lawyer.

Early on, he says in Ethical Ambition, "I enjoyed the challenge of conveying my thoughts into words." He says his writing career didn't come together initially because he "didn't have a model." His role models were two lawyers and a judge who befriended him in his Pittsburgh neighborhood as a boy.

Long praised for his civil rights work and leadership in the law classroom, Bell also has filled a void, providing Black lawyers with literary aspirations at least one impressive model.

Brian Gilmore is a poet, writer and public interest lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved