Derrick Bell Presents 1996 Foulston & Siefkin Lecture

Derrick Bell, well-known and highly respected legal scholar and law professor, will present the 1996 Foulston-Siefkin Lecture at the Washburn University School of Law on Friday, April 12, beginning at 10:00 a.m. in Room 114 of the Law School.

Professor Bell became Harvard Law School's first black tenured law professor. He was dismissed by Harvard after serving on the faculty for eighteen years when he refused to end a two-year leave taken to protest the school's failure to hire and tenure women of color on the faculty. Professor Bell is the author of four books on the law, his most recent being, "Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Professor."

Professor Bell has spent his 38 years of professional life in various areas of civil rights work: in litigation, administration, teaching, and scholarship. He is the author of four well-known books. His text, "Race, Racism and American Law," was published in 1971 and is now in its third edition, published in 1992. It is used in civil rights courses at both the law school and undergraduate levels in schools across the country.

His book of allegorical stories on racial issues: "Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism," published in 1992, is the second book of its kind. The first was "And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice," publsihed in 1987.

After an early career as a Justice Department lawyer, a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a Deputy Director for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1969 and became its first black tenured member in 1971.

In 1989, he resigned to become the dean at the University of Oregon Law School. He resigned in protest when the law faculty there refused to offer a faculty position to an Asian-American candidate listed as third on the list when two, white male candidates listed first and second declined the position.

Since 1991, Bell has been a visiting professor at the New York University Law School. In addition to his teaching duties there, he lectures around the country and is a frequent guest on radio and television programs.