When Derrick Bell became the first African American dean at the University of Oregon School of Law in 1981, he brought his established reputation as a trailblazing national thought leader on civil rights and the understanding of racism and American law.
Dean Bell was the first African American tenured professor at Harvard University School of Law. While there, he published the original casebook for teaching race-related law courses, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” which is now a standard textbook in US law schools.
Credited as one of the creators of the school of thought known as critical race theory, Bell’s interest convergence theory is still relevant and a point of discussion for academics several decades later. It holds inclusion only happens for Black people when it's in the interest of White people.
Bell worked extensively on civil rights, serving in the Department of Justice, the NAACP, and the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He administered Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and contributed to drafting the 1968 school desegregation guidelines.
He led Oregon Law until 1985, when he resigned in protest of the school's decision to not offer a faculty position to an Asian American woman.
“He came here with great expectation and high hopes. And he loved Eugene,” said Bell’s widow and activist Janet Dewart Bell, speaking to UO Today in a 2020 interview. The faculty had “ignored a very qualified woman of color. And Derrick just thought that was horrible. And he thought it was not only something that was bad for the university and, obviously, for the women in particular, but it was an insult to the things he thought he would contribute to the university.”
“The leaving in Oregon was painful,” Dewart Bell continued. “He left on principal and in anger, but not in despair and not in disdain for the university.”
Bell’s firm commitment to doing what is right and his advocacy for others, even when it came at costs to himself, exemplified the legacy still honored across the nation today. Bell died in October 2011 at age 80.
Honoring Dean Bell's memory and continuing to learn from his example, the Derrick Bell Lecture was first hosted by Oregon Law in 2013. It became part of the UO African American Workshop and Lecture Series sponsored by the Division of Equity and Inclusion and the Office of the President in 2017 and endures today.