| Carolyn Wheat | 210-999-8406 | cwheat@trinity.edu |
| "Dr. King's Legacy: A Help or Harm in the Racial Struggle?" - Subject of MLK Day Commemoration |
| December 1, 1999 - Derrick Bell, well-known and highly respected legal scholar and law professor, will come to Trinity University to commemorate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. His lecture, titled "Dr. King's Legacy: A Help or Harm in the Racial Struggle?," will be delivered on Monday, January 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Laurie Auditorium. Admission is free and open to the public.
Bell became Harvard Law School's first black tenured professor in 1971. While there, he developed an innovative teaching style, authored what has become a standard law school text, Race, Racism and American Law, and was in the forefront of "critical race theory." This theory holds that people's perspectives on events are overwhelmingly determined by their racial background, and legal policies and precedents also bear the influences of racism and sexism. Prior to his academic career, Bell worked with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in the late 1950s and with the legal team at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, having been recruited by Thurgood Marshall. Assigned to Mississippi during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement, Bell represented blacks in hundreds of suits which led to the dismantlement of legal segregation in schools and public facilities. In 1980, Bell left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon Law School. Five years later he resigned his position in protest when the law faculty there refused to offer a faculty position to an Asian-American candidate, ranked third on the list, when the first two candidates, both white males, declined the appointment. Returning to Harvard in 1986, Bell served as the Weld Professor of Law until 1992. There, once again, he put principle above his own employment security. After refusing to end a two-year leave taken in protest over the school's failure to hire and tenure women of color, he was dismissed by Harvard. Currently, Bell is a visiting professor at New York University Law School. His books include Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home, Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester, and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. |
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Last updated on November 8, 2000 by the Office of Public Relations |