Derrick Bell changed the face of academia in the Ivy League and challenged racial views with provocative books, essays and short stories. Bell died at the age 80 in New York on Oct. 6, but he will be remembered for making remarkable strides throughout his career and breaking racial boundaries by becoming Harvard Law School’s first tenured black professor and dean of the law school.
He also fought racial injustices. Bell once staged a five-day sit-in in 1986 to protest Harvard’s refusal to give tenure to two professors who worked on race theory, and he took an unpaid leave of absence and would not return until Harvard hired a black woman as a tenured faculty member in 1990.
Bell also challenged racial matters with books such as Race, Racism and American Law, and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.
The latter book featured the engaging short story, “The Space Traders.” Written in 1992 and set at the start of the year 2000, the story revolves around a group of aliens who land in America with an irresistible offer to the government and the majority of whites. Equipped with tons of gold, chemicals that can eradicate pollution and a limitless amount of safe nuclear energy and fuel, the aliens are willing to fork over all of those resources in exchange for the entire black population in America.
Bell examines how personal gain would provoke the government, a torn black Republican, civil rights groups, evangelists, white militants, the Jewish community, and businessmen to justify or denounce the mass removal of blacks from American soil. Bell combines science fiction and legal history to paint a gripping view on how race is embedded in the fabric of U.S. history.
While a student at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama compared Bell to Rosa Parks. He is survived by his wife and three sons. –amir shaw
Click Here to Read Bell’s Short Story “The Space Traders”
