Deanna H. Wilson

BIOGRAPHY PROJECT- DERRICK BELL

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Derrick Bell was the first tenured African American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

He is most often credited as the author of the Critical Race Theory.

Derrick Bell was born on November 6, 1930 in Pittsburgh.

He was the eldest of four children.

His father Derrick Bell Sr. was a millworker and department store porter.

His mother was a homemaker.

Derrick was the eldest of four children and was the first person in his family to go to college.

He spoke up in class and earned good grades.

EARLY HISTORY

According to Vygotsky and the sociocultural approach, “Individuals and cultural communities mutually create each other. Certain forms of social practice relate children and their needs and goals to the environment and define what

that environment means to them. Children behave in certain ways because they are trying to obtain certain

outcomes within their environment” (Miller, 2011, p.171).

Derrick Bell was born into a family and culture where education was valued, even though the caregivers were not

highly educated. Once given an opportunity to attend college, Bell responded by speaking up and making good

grades.

APPLYING DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

When he graduated from college in 1957, Bell was employed by the Department of Justice in the Honor

Graduate Recruitment Program and later the Civil Rights Division because of his interest in racial issues..

However, his time in this division was short-lived because Bell’s employers began to pressure him to give up his two dollar membership in the NAACP because they felt it was

an insidious organization. Bell refused.

In retaliation, the senior officials physically moved Bell’s desk into the hallway and limited his number of caseloads. They continued to pressure him to resign his membership in the NAACP. Derrick chose to resign his position with the

department instead.

GRADUATION FROM COLLEGE

“Vygotsky also emphasized that the history of a culture powerfully shapes all levels of contexts. Wars, natural disasters, revolutions, economic depressions, and civil

rights movements reverberate at all contextual levels. At any one point in history a culture is both a product of its

own history and a provider of settings that shape children’s development and, consequently, the future of the culture”

(Miller, 2011, p. 173)

Even though the issue was a two dollar membership in an organization for the rights of Black people, Bell’s culture shaped his mindset in such a way that he was willing to

resign his position than give in to a demand that he felt was fundamentally offensive in principle.

IMPLICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Derrick Bell was eventually fired from this job with the Justice Department for his refusal to give up his NAACP membership. Upon returning to Pittsburgh, Derrick met and married Jewel Hairston, who was also a civil rights

activist and educator. They had 3 sons and remained married until his death in 1990. Bell believed deeply in the

importance of family and love.

THE MAKING OF AN ACTIVIST

“Culture cannot be separated out and treated as an external factor; culture is everywher, and it serves to

organize all experience. Mind and culture is everywhere, and it serves to organize all experience. Mind and culture

cannot be separated. Each culture has its own cultural curriculum” (Miller, 2011, p. 174-175) Vygotsky refers to

this context as the Zone of Proximal Development.

Derrick Bell was primed by his culture to speak out and seek out the truth at any early age by his parents. When he

chose a mate, he married a lady with similar civil rights activist views and views on education. It became a burning

issue to Derrick Bell that he somehow reach out and educate the masses on inequities that abounded at this

time.

IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

From 1060-1966, Derrick worked to dismantle the vestiges of Jim Crow and school segregation in the south alongside Thurgood Marshall. He continued his school desegregation work as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the

U.S. department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

It was also at this time that Derrick Bell became interested in teaching law. His initial application to law school was

unsuccessful but eventually got a job as the first executive director of the Western center on Law and Poverty at the

University of Southern California Law School where he ran a public interest law center and taught his first classes.

FIGHTER FOR DISSOLUTION OF JIM CROW LAWS

Vygotsky stated that “Learning within the zone is possible in part because of intersubjectivity—shared understanding, based on a common focus of attention and a common goal,

between a child and a more competent person” (Miller, 2011, p. 177).

Derrick Bell and his constituents that he sought to reach had lived Jim Crow laws and had shared understanding. Teacher, therefore, seems to be a logical step for Bell to

take based on his experiences and common focus. He wanted to bring a big problem out to the forefront so that it

could be addressed, understood and rectified.

Vygotsky further states that: “the zone can refer to any situation in which some activity is leading children beyond

their current level of functioning” (p. 178).

IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

When Derrick Bell joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1971, he became the first black tenured professor on the faculty of the law school. By 1973, he wrote the first book that would define his place in educational history—Race,

Racism and American Law. This book is a study of race and the law and how the two intermingle.

BELL’S PROTEST YEARS

In 1973 Derrick Bell published a work “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma”. He

argued that white Americans would only support racial and social justice to the extent that it benefits them. His

argument that the Supreme c court's decision in Brown was driven, not by concerns over general equality and progress

for black Americans, but rather by concerns over the nation’s emerging role as an anti-Communist military

superpower.

As a result of Bell’s new critical race thinking, he resigned his position as Dean of Oregon Law in protest of the

faculty’s refusal to hire an Asian American female professor and returned to Harvard.

THE DEBUT OF BELL’S CRITICAL RACE THEORY

“Vygotsky argued that learning drives development. As children learn (proceed through the zone of proximal

development), they achieve a higher level of development. In turn, children’s level of development affects their

readiness to learn a new concept.” (Miller, 2011, p. 197).

As Derrick Bell grew, he attended college initially and acquired a knowledge set. The more he interacted with his environment and the issues at hand in that place and time

in his culture, Bell began to achieve the higher level of development. He was posed to proceed to learn new

concepts and thus, constructed his critical race theory.

INTEGRATION OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Derrick loved teaching and was a popular professor at NYU. He taught his introductory and advanced constitutional law

courses in a non-traditional and non-Socratic style, that Derrick called “participatory learning.” This pedagogy

builds on the important work of Paulo Freire, and features each student as an active participant in learning.

DERRICK BELL THE TEACHER

Derrick Bell’s style of teaching is supported by Piaget’s theory of cognitive learning. Piaget believed that students should be active participants in the learning process. “He posited an inherently active organism. Children tirelessly

explore, hypothesize, test, and evaluate; they do this either overtly [particularly in the sensorimotor period] and covertly [as in the manipulation of symbols, concrete

operations, and formal operations] No external motivation is necessary. Children are intrinisically motivated; schemes

are used simply because they exist” (Miller, 2011, p. 68)

PIAGET THEORY OF DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

During his long and prestigious academic career, Derrick Bell wrote prolifically. His writings include: Race, Racism and

American Law

Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform

Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth

Afrolantica Legacies

Constitutional Conflicts

Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protestor

Gospel Choirs

Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism)

And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice

CAREER AS A WRITER

“Derrick Bell is often credited as a founder of Critical Race theory, a school of thought and scholarship that critically

engages questions of race and racism in the law, investigating how even those legal institutions purporting

to remedy racism can more profoundly entrench it.”

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

“My passion for racial justice grew out of years of work in the field, first as a litigator and then administrator, and

later as a teacher and a writer. I channeled my writing into legal briefs and motions in civil rights practice, and later into teaching and law review articles. A teaching position

provided a platform for writing legal essays and ten allegorical stories. Musing at length on the nature of passions, I realize that the fervor of my feelings about justice has motivated my entry into activities where my

passion could take the form of writing” (Bell, 2002, p. 21)

CONCLUSION

Bell, D. (2002). Ethical ambition living a life of meaning and worth. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Miller, P. H. (2011). Theories of developmental psychology (fifth ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publisher.

(n.d.). In http://professorderrickbell.com. Retrieved December 4, 2013

REFERENCES