Raising Hell for a Cause : ‘I’m a Troublemaker Too’

For all his public anger, Derrick Bell is surprisingly genial and soft-spoken in private. On a rainy Sunday, he welcomes a visitor to his Greenwich Village home, pours two cups of coffee and seems miles away from the wars of Harvard.

Yet to spend even a few hours with Bell is to encounter a man deeply troubled--not only by his own story, but by the barriers facing his people. As he sees it, his parents, teachers and childhood friends prepared him to be a hell-raiser, and he’s never let them down.

Born in Pittsburgh, Bell had no shortage of role models. When he was 7, his mother stunned her landlord by waving a rent check in front of him and saying he wouldn’t be paid until he fixed broken stairs in her building. As a paperboy, Bell met black lawyers who encouraged him to think about law as a career. Soon, he began speaking out against racial injustice.

During the Korean War, Bell was an Air Force lieutenant who rebelled against sitting in the back of military buses in Louisiana. He once startled a minister by trying to integrate an all-white church choir.

After graduating from Duquesne University with a law degree, he went to work in the Justice Department and promptly sparked another controversy: When superiors told him to resign his membership in the NAACP, saying it posed a conflict of interest, he declined--and quit.

For the next six years, Bell worked for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People on some of the nation’s most heated civil rights cases. When legal education beckoned, he taught at the University of Southern California before coming to Harvard.

“I was one of those persons singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” he says. “I really believed the civil rights movement was the answer for black folk, and I thought that constant legal pressure would help end racism in this country.”

But Bell began singing a different tune as blacks experienced one civil rights setback after another. At Harvard, he was angered by the rigorous and apparently inflexible guidelines the school used to make tenure decisions. Normally, applicants were expected to have graduated at the top of their class from an elite school and to have worked on the law review. Typically, they had clerked for Supreme Court justices or other jurists.

Bell met none of those guidelines when he was hired, yet he received tenure. Had the university panicked in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and made him the token black? The evidence seemed inescapable, Bell says. His mood darkened as the 1980s progressed, and personal tragedy intervened when his wife, Jewell, died of breast cancer in 1990. Bell remarried earlier this year.

These days, he finds comfort in a stark, unremitting pessimism that alienates some of his African-American colleagues. Blacks must free themselves of illusion and recognize the permanence of racism in American life, he says, before they can fight meaningful battles to achieve justice.

It’s a long way from “We Shall Overcome,” a shot of Albert Camus instead. Bell relishes the irony and suggests that his new book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism,” is a primer in racial existentialism, a guide to the absurd for recovering militants.

As he has in previous works, the author uses parables and tales to make his points. The most compelling story, “Space Traders,” is a chilling example of Bell’s political outlook as well as his unorthodox teaching methods.

On Jan. 1 in the year 2000, Bell writes, alien creatures in large spaceships begin landing on the East Coast. They come bearing incredible gifts: gold to bail out the country’s bankrupt government. Chemicals to clean up polluted air and waterways. Miracle technology for safe nuclear fuel.

“In return, the visitors wanted only one thing,” he writes. “And that was to take back to their star all the African-Americans who lived in the United States.”

At first, white America piously denounces the idea. But it eventually backs the trade and votes overwhelmingly to ship blacks off to another planet. In the end, African-Americans are gathered in long lines for transport: “Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.”

The story sparks consternation among blacks and whites when he reads it in public, Bell says, but that’s to be expected. America hasn’t come close to solving its racial problems, he adds, and neither has Harvard.

“People think it was a tough thing for me to give up my job,” Bell says, “but I have to believe there are more important things in life. Perhaps I failed, but I showed my students what’s important. That’s because I’m a teacher. And maybe I’m a troublemaker too. Probably both.”