Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory Pioneer, Remains a Hero to His Students

Harvard Law School professor and Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell had radical ideas about the civil rights struggle and the Constitution, believing that white supremacy was so fundamental to our society that it would make racial equality almost impossible. To many of his colleagues, and especially to his most devoted students, however, Bell is fondly remembered as a caring and graceful mentor and father figure, as gentlemanly as he was radical.

Erin Edmonds, a member of the Harvard Law class of 1991, was a student of Bell’s who became his research assistant and co-author, ghost writing portions of, and editing, Faces From the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, among other works.

The controversial book, which argued that black suppression holds American society together, was criticized at the time for defending Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Edmonds’s classmate, Barack Obama, assigned the introduction to the book to his University of Chicago law students, along with Bell’s writings on the history of civil rights law.

Edmonds, who is an executive vice president of an in-house corporate legal department in her native Utah, spoke to Breitbart News about her experiences with Bell, who called her his “adopted daughter,” as well as about the origins and effects of Critical Race Theory.

Bell was not as conclusive in his views, she believes, as he is often portrayed to be. Rather, she says, “he was really rather tentative,” and came to his radical views by way of disappointment with real-world experiences.

It is important, Edmonds says, to remember the ways in which Bell’s experiences shaped his ideas:

Bell was hired by Thurgood Marshall [who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and later became the Court’s first black Justice] when he [Bell] was a local NAACP executive in Philadelphia after graduating from law school. Marshall hired Bell to help with school desegregation cases in the South [to enforce the Brown decision]. It was dangerous, and it was segregated, and it was discouraging to encounter massive white southern resistance. Bell fought through these piecemeal litigative methods, and Iived through the aftermath, and I think he was just profoundly discouraged by the extent to which structural and institutional racism had not budged much. He was careful to point out that to say there had been no progress was ridiculous, but structural racism had not changed much for those who needed it most. After all, whom did the civil rights struggle really benefit most? Upper class and middle class blacks, and middle- and working-class white women. His worry was that he had left the needy behind, and so he tentatively put forward these theories as questions.

After demanding that Harvard hire black female legal scholar Regina Austin, leading a demonstration in April 1990 (where he was introduced by Obama), and taking unpaid leave from Harvard in protest, Bell returned to campus in the fall of 1990 to offer a non-credit seminar, “Civil Rights at the Crossroads.” He had taught it in previous years, and used it as a laboratory for ideas–including his controversial science fiction story, “The Space Traders,” in which white Americans trade their black countrymen to aliens.

The seminar, Edmonds recalls, included a spectrum of left and liberal students–and even some conservatives–from across the Harvard campus. “The Space Traders” was just the beginning:

He wanted to open up our minds away from strategies that had worked for their limited purpose. Far from being a victory lap [after his protest], that course was intended to snap us out of thinking in traditional ways that no longer worked for people like we: civil rights lawyers, poverty lawyers, even conservatives interested in fighting civil rights privately and less [through] state action.

His class was very effective. Through the use of storytelling, Bell captured the attention of people very quickly, and forced them into [using] a different part of their brains. The most powerful [story] was probably “Space Traders.” The universal reaction, even from conservatives, was that it was possible–not likely, or probable, but possible. That horrified us all. Bell, speaking to a rarified audience of mostly legal students who might well be his legatees, said there are intransigent elements of injustice that are left–and wanted this next generation to think about different ways of fighting that injustice.

Edmonds does not recall Obama attending that seminar, but notes that “Barack and Bell, as consummate intellectuals and diplomats who both welcomed dissent with their views, had an enormous amount of respect for one another,” though they did not mix socially. She describes Obama’s decision to introduce Bell at the protest as an example of the respect Obama enjoyed, and his diplomatic skill.

“Obama’s instinct to find common ground was apparent. And it wasn’t forced. I’ll be honest. There were some hardcore neoconservatives at Harvard Law School, and Barack handled them calmly. He listened to them–and there were times I was incensed and said, ‘How can you stand this?’–but he’s a consummate diplomat.”

Obama was in Edmonds’s law school “section,” a subdivision of students who take all of their first-year requirements together. In the annual moot court exercise, Edmonds was dismayed to draw Obama as an opponent– “of 550 people in that first-year class at Harvard Law School, there was exactly one person whom no one wanted to draw”–and she burst into tears.

“He’s very sensitive, and when he saw me, he put his arm around me and he started laughing. I said, ‘That’s not funny.’ And he said, “Erin, you yell back at professors–what are you afraid of?’”

She and her partner lost to Obama and his partner, she says, but at least the Obama team “didn’t wipe the floor with us.”

Besides the five full-year courses that all first year law students take, Edmonds and Obama were also together in at least two other classes–one on racial issues with Professor Randall L. Kennedy. (Edmonds says she believes Obama was also in her classes on corporate law and the law of terrorism, but she cannot be sure. Obama has not yet released his law school transcripts.)

Edmonds describes Kennedy as a protégé of Bell’s who had followed his own path.

Read the full article here.