It is a high honor to be asked to write a few words about Derrick Bell, a true hero and a giant of the legal profession. The relevance of his theories have endured. Those theories include his theory of interest convergence and Brown v. Board of Education, which has gained new traction amidst debates over police reform, and his critique of civil rights lawyering, which has inspired a reimagining of social justice advocacy and laid the groundwork for the widespread adoption of “movement lawyering” in the age of Black Lives Matter. The influence of his engaging approach to teaching still reverberates as well, surviving through the lives of his students. But I thought that the most honest way for me to describe how Bell touched me personally would be to reflect on the time in May of 2008 when I read his career retrospective text called Ethical Ambition. At the time, my life was at a crossroads. I had graduated from law school one year earlier. In the interim, my grandfather — the primary male influence in my life — had passed. In that space I also had taken and flunked the bar exam. Meanwhile, I was in a job that I had come to realize that I hated, working in a tense corporate environment and under heavy scrutiny from primarily white co-workers. Soon after retaking the bar exam, I ended up in the hospital with chest pains as a result of the stress.
I was unfulfilled and at a loss. My medical situation and my grandfather’s death had created a sense of urgency in me to seek out a more fulfilling career path, but I was unsure of what that path was. Coincidentally, that spring, I was invited to speak at a symposium in recognition of the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. It was my first time returning to law school since my graduation. As I listened to the other scholars and engaged in a critical dialogue concerning racial injustice and the law’s role in its maintenance, I realized then that a career in legal academia would give me the chance to pursue my passion for racial justice and to be challenged intellectually in the process. That was what I wanted for myself, deep down. There was one problem: I had no idea how to get the job. To be honest, even more challenging than the how was the question of why. More specifically: why me? Becoming a law professor seemed so elite a professional path, and so out of reach. I didn’t know if I could find the bravery to risk failure in the law teaching market.
Then I read Bell’s book. The key question of the book is: “How can I maintain my integrity while seeking success?” Instead of simply aspiring to become successful by conventional standards, like status or wealth, Bell wants us to understand that there is true value and fulfillment in the decision to aspire ethically. This means deciding to climb the ladder of integrity first and the ladder of worldly achievement second. Bell defined people of integrity simply as people who achieve their goals “without compromising their sense of who they are.” A more precise definition, drawn from Stephen Carter’s Integrity, frames it as three step process “(1) discerning what is right and what is wrong; (2) acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and (3) saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.”
I was aware of Bell’s work and career because of his role in founding Critical Race Theory, but still, I was a bit surprised to come across a book written by him on this theme. Integrity was not exactly the type of subject I had expected a racial-justice-oriented academic or activist to focus on, especially when there is so much to discuss from a doctrinal, theoretical, and political perspective. But what made me revere Bell was that he not only made impact as a scholar, but also as an activist. Bell was the rare person who gained the respect of people across many different professional and personal communities. It actually was integrity that separated Bell. He brought his political analysis to life; he made his powerful reflections on racial justice a reality through action. Bell wrote that, throughout his career, his primary goal was not so much money or status, but, instead, “to live the life I sing about in my song.”
Bell famously was willing to resign from prestigious jobs to make a righteous point. In the process, Bell found that “leaving jobs and engaging in other activities to protest what I felt was wrong did not destroy my career. To the contrary, those actions, while not always easy to take, enriched my life and provided me with the perhaps unrealistic but no less satisfying sense that I was doing God’s work.”
Although he could not have predicted it, Bell’s integrity not only gave him a sense of purpose, it also led him to enormous success. This began in the 1950s, when he resigned his position in the newly formed Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice after his superiors demanded that he cancel his membership in the NAACP. From there, Bell left the legal field to become the head of his local Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP. When Thurgood Marshall heard about Bell’s resignation from the Department of Justice, he offered him a position at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Soon, Bell was working on civil rights cases “with a small but elite cadre of four attorneys: Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, Jack Greenberg, and James Nabrit III.”
Ironically, throughout Bell’s career this pattern of protest resignations leading to even more prestigious perches would repeat. While serving as Dean at the University of Oregon in the early 1980s, Bell resigned when the faculty failed to hire a qualified Asian American candidate. That school year, Bell was invited by the Harvard Law Review to compose the Foreword to the 1984 Supreme Court Term for the November issue. In his piece, Bell hit upon the idea of communicating his legal analysis through a dialogue between himself and a fictional super-lawyer named Geneva Crenshaw, a literary device that would provide the foundation for his first two most popular books and that would lead him to become a public intellectual and household name.
After leaving Oregon he returned to teach at Harvard Law but soon thereafter took leave without pay in protest of Harvard’s decision not to appoint a woman of color to the faculty. Again, his protest launched Bell’s career to new heights. This resignation would be widely covered in the media (as shown in this news story featuring a supportive speech from then law student Barack Obama), and his book release in 1992, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, would be his most well received popular work, landing on the New York Times best seller list. In his time of need, Bell’s friends at New York University School of Law offered him a visiting professor position that limited his administrative responsibilities, providing him more time to engage in his true loves, teaching and public pedagogy. Over the next few years, he disseminated his work in the form of film, and continued to write more books and law review articles.
Recently, reflecting on Ethical Ambition for the first time in many years, I was shocked at how accurate Bell’s insights were, and how I saw a similar pattern in my career. To be clear, I’ve fallen far short of Bell’s standard in terms of scholarship, teaching, service, and, most importantly, integrity; but in my proudest moments, like him I found myself ironically rewarded in the all too rare moments when I did the right thing at personal cost, when I tried to “live the life I sign about in my song.”
In 2014, I lived about ten minutes from Ferguson when Mike Brown was killed. Making the decision to dive headfirst into that protest movement was one of the formative decisions in my career, and it was not a strategic decision, but a moral one. My law school punished me for it; although there were some staff and faculty who were proud of my work, I faced backlash from students, who resented that I was taking time away from teaching to protest and described their feelings vocally in my teaching evaluations (which mattered to me greatly as I was pre-tenure), colleagues who felt that I was serving as a poor role model by getting arrested at a protest, and law school administrators who refused to support my decision to accompany the protesters to the United Nations because, perhaps, they feared that political disapproval might affect the school’s reputation.
When the blowback resulted in attempts to push me out of the University completely, what ironically happened was that the community that I had gained in the protest stood up for me. This wasn’t mysterious or magical, though. I knew that it was always community that led to my success — it was my mentors, like Professor Emma Coleman Jordan who guided me as I began my foray into the law teaching field, like Judge Damon Keith who gave me a chance and introduced me to other faculty, and even many law journal editors who edited my work and helped my writing to reach a publishable quality. Each step of the way in my career, it was community that guided me forward. In this episode, it was the Saint Louis University Black Law Students Association, my mentor Cheryl Harris at U.C.L.A., and others who came to my aid and helped me navigate the backlash. Ultimately, I was able to move, first to Georgetown for a visiting faculty position, and now to Howard University; through the opportunities I was given at both institutions, I was able to escape the pressure cooker St. Louis had become for me without getting cooked. Today I lead the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law, and I teach Constitutional Law there, as well as Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Movement Lawyering clinics.
It’s unrealistic and unwise to take career risks with the expectation that, magically, your career will benefit and you will achieve more status and more money as a result. I’m sure that it often doesn’t work out like that. But it is pleasant if it happens — that your community observes you falling through the cracks and decides to stand in the gap to lift you up — as they did for me. In either event, Bell’s admission was that “[e]ven when the ethical way leads to loss rather than gain, animosity rather than acclaim, there is reassurance in the knowledge that compromising my integrity would not have led me to an outcome that was meaningful and satisfying.” For me, this was true. Bell was right that my decision to do what I thought was right in Ferguson, even when it was dangerous and could have destroyed my career, would provide me with the most meaning. You could say that I found out that protest was my safe space. Years from now, I know I will be prouder of doing what I thought was right in Ferguson than of all my law review articles and lectures put together.