Professor Derrick Bell (1930-2011), a personal appreciation by Russel Barsh
Jan 20, 2025
In May 1971, on the eve of my graduation from Harvard College, I experienced a conflict of conscience. On the one hand, I had been offered a doctoral fellowship at Penn as a teaching assistant for paleontologist Loren Eiseley, with whom I shared an intellectual passion for clues to the early evolution of hominid intelligence. On the other hand, several summers of teaching and growing a network of family friends at Crow Agency, Montana, combined with an “ally” role in the newly-organized American Indian Students Association at Harvard, led me to a last-minute application to the Law School, shepherded by the only professor I knew there, a sociologist that had been assigned to my undergraduate thesis committee. I could work with Eiseley and become a professor. Or help my friends fight over control of their land and communities through the law, a branch of power in which we still believed.
I mailed my regrets to Eiseley and walked across the campus to register at the law school. When I shared the news with my mentor, Stephen Jay Gould, for whom I had worked for two years as a lab assistant, he dropped an armful of books and exclaimed, “you will fossilize!” Pretty tough words, from a paleontologist.
It was the first day of classes at the law school that I inquired about whether there were any Native students in my cohort. That was how I met Sakej Henderson, who has remained a life-long friend and collaborator on the “justice” side of my life. And we soon discovered a handful of other “Skins” in graduate programs, all of whom complained about the lack of courses addressing the contemporary conditions and legal status of “Indian tribes”. Sakej and I confronted our first-year constitutional law professor about the exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the Fourteenth Amendment, and he waved it away as an irrelevant “historical accident”. Other faculty were a bit more kind. Ultimately, students demanded a legal history course open to all the graduate schools. But who could teach it? We were told that it had to be a law professor.
And this is where Derrick Bell comes into the story. He had become Harvard’s first Black law professor two years earlier. Sakej and I made an appointment with him that expanded into a lengthy, emotional, but exceedingly courteous argument over what Derrick called “separationist” (as opposed to “integrationist”) goals of Native American Tribal leaders and the urban activists of the American Indian Movement, which originally modeled itself on the Black Panthers. It was abundantly clear that we had entirely opposite views of civil rights. Sakej and I were certain that we would get no help from Derrick; but to our surprise, he volunteered to supervise our course. His conditions were that Sakej and I teach it, as graduate assistants, and continue our argument.
Thus, Harvard got its first graduate course in Native American legal and political history; Sakej and I were initiated into university teaching; the Native American experience became part of the development of Critical Race Theory, which Derrick was developing out of the philosophy of Critical Legal Theory that was already rooting itself among the younger Harvard Law faculty; and we began a lifetime friendship with a soft-spoken, compassionate and principled scholar who could be fierce in his commitment to justice.
It is worth explaining that Critical Legal Theory, as espoused by Harvard scholars Duncan Kennedy and Mort Horwitz (Mort, a historian, was my law-thesis adviser), can be summarized as an approach to laws and court decisions that focuses on their effects, rather than the words used. Derrick’s Critical Race Theory was a corollary: look for racism in the actual effects of laws, rather than their texts. Do that, and you discovered the deck is stacked, systemically.
Derrick resigned from the Harvard faculty in 1992 to protest the school’s failure to recruit and hire a Black woman. (I resigned a tenured position eight years later over my faculty’s defense of a professor that had sexually abused female graduate students.) Derrick served as Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law for five years, and eventually landed at New York University, just before I began a “guest lectureship” there. As soon as we discovered we were both at NYU, we indulged in a long, leisurely lunch at an Italian bistro in the East Village to catch up.
Over pasta, we returned to the dialectic of separation and integration, trading examples from our respective recent experiences with the Black civil-rights movement and the evolution of Tribal sovereignty in the 1990s. Derrick confessed that he was beginning to wonder whether prosperous Black towns and counties would have fared better if they had invested in their own lands, businesses and colleges instead of integrating. I explained how many Tribal governments had embraced kleptocracy and pretty oppression, abusing their growing powers; now there were civil rights activists fighting Tribes. We had a good laugh about the extent to which our viewpoints had reversed in 25 years.
That was the last time that I saw the architect of Critical Race Theory, who did not live to see his views of the law publicly vilified, and banished as somehow anti-American. Barack Obama was President when Derrick died, a small mercy.
I mailed my regrets to Eiseley and walked across the campus to register at the law school. When I shared the news with my mentor, Stephen Jay Gould, for whom I had worked for two years as a lab assistant, he dropped an armful of books and exclaimed, “you will fossilize!” Pretty tough words, from a paleontologist.
It was the first day of classes at the law school that I inquired about whether there were any Native students in my cohort. That was how I met Sakej Henderson, who has remained a life-long friend and collaborator on the “justice” side of my life. And we soon discovered a handful of other “Skins” in graduate programs, all of whom complained about the lack of courses addressing the contemporary conditions and legal status of “Indian tribes”. Sakej and I confronted our first-year constitutional law professor about the exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the Fourteenth Amendment, and he waved it away as an irrelevant “historical accident”. Other faculty were a bit more kind. Ultimately, students demanded a legal history course open to all the graduate schools. But who could teach it? We were told that it had to be a law professor.
And this is where Derrick Bell comes into the story. He had become Harvard’s first Black law professor two years earlier. Sakej and I made an appointment with him that expanded into a lengthy, emotional, but exceedingly courteous argument over what Derrick called “separationist” (as opposed to “integrationist”) goals of Native American Tribal leaders and the urban activists of the American Indian Movement, which originally modeled itself on the Black Panthers. It was abundantly clear that we had entirely opposite views of civil rights. Sakej and I were certain that we would get no help from Derrick; but to our surprise, he volunteered to supervise our course. His conditions were that Sakej and I teach it, as graduate assistants, and continue our argument.
Thus, Harvard got its first graduate course in Native American legal and political history; Sakej and I were initiated into university teaching; the Native American experience became part of the development of Critical Race Theory, which Derrick was developing out of the philosophy of Critical Legal Theory that was already rooting itself among the younger Harvard Law faculty; and we began a lifetime friendship with a soft-spoken, compassionate and principled scholar who could be fierce in his commitment to justice.
It is worth explaining that Critical Legal Theory, as espoused by Harvard scholars Duncan Kennedy and Mort Horwitz (Mort, a historian, was my law-thesis adviser), can be summarized as an approach to laws and court decisions that focuses on their effects, rather than the words used. Derrick’s Critical Race Theory was a corollary: look for racism in the actual effects of laws, rather than their texts. Do that, and you discovered the deck is stacked, systemically.
Derrick resigned from the Harvard faculty in 1992 to protest the school’s failure to recruit and hire a Black woman. (I resigned a tenured position eight years later over my faculty’s defense of a professor that had sexually abused female graduate students.) Derrick served as Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law for five years, and eventually landed at New York University, just before I began a “guest lectureship” there. As soon as we discovered we were both at NYU, we indulged in a long, leisurely lunch at an Italian bistro in the East Village to catch up.
Over pasta, we returned to the dialectic of separation and integration, trading examples from our respective recent experiences with the Black civil-rights movement and the evolution of Tribal sovereignty in the 1990s. Derrick confessed that he was beginning to wonder whether prosperous Black towns and counties would have fared better if they had invested in their own lands, businesses and colleges instead of integrating. I explained how many Tribal governments had embraced kleptocracy and pretty oppression, abusing their growing powers; now there were civil rights activists fighting Tribes. We had a good laugh about the extent to which our viewpoints had reversed in 25 years.
That was the last time that I saw the architect of Critical Race Theory, who did not live to see his views of the law publicly vilified, and banished as somehow anti-American. Barack Obama was President when Derrick died, a small mercy.

Derrick Bell at the University of Washington, 1980

Bruce, as he noted in the text, Russel's role in the American Indian Students Association was as an "ally". He is not Native American and not enrolled in any Tribe or First Nation.
Russel, it is unclear to me, are you Native American heritage? If so, what tribe?