Black Professor Capability to Teach African American History

Professor Derrick Bell was not only the first black tenured professor at HLS, but he was also one of the first legal scholars to be critical of the court victories that civil rights lawyers had secured in the 1950s and 1960s—victories that had brought formal racial equality to the country. While most of his contemporaries wrote with a certain satisfaction about all of the gains that people of color had achieved as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, Bell was less sanguine. In his scholarship and teaching, he sought to disturb many of the racial truisms that had come to be accepted.
Bell challenged the assumption that the litigation strategies adopted by civil rights lawyers actually reflected the desires and needs of the marginalized people that the lawyers purported to represent. He disputed the belief that the grant of civil rights to people of color solely (or, even, mostly) benefited people of color. And he contested the proposition that society was well on its way to expunging itself of racial injustice. Importantly, Bell did not worry solely about racial issues that were “out there” in society; he was also quite concerned about racial issues that were much closer to home—at Harvard Law School, to be exact. Bell was distressed by the dearth of faculty of color at the school. After the school failed to hire or tenure any black female professors after a number of years, Bell left in protest.
Bell’s departure from HLS meant that the course on race that he had taught in semesters past—a course that explored how various aspects of American law created and sustained a racial hierarchy in which people of color resided at the bottom—would go unoffered. Several students of color approached the administration and asked that the school hire a black professor to teach the course in Bell’s place. The school responded by saying that there was no black professor alive who could meet HLS’s standards of excellence in hiring. However, the school did promise to offer a three-week “mini-course” on civil rights that would be taught by Jack Greenberg, the white director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Julius Chamber, a well-respected black civil rights attorney.
The students boycotted the school’s mini-course on civil rights. Instead of enrolling in the class that the school offered, they organized an “Alternative Course” that they could take instead. Under the sponsorship of HLS professor Charles Ogletree, the “Alternative Course” featured law professors of color from other institutions who were invited to give lectures that offered critical analyses of the relationship between law and race. Writes Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was one of the student protestors at Harvard Law School, “The Alternative Course is a useful point to mark the genesis of Critical Race Theory,” as “it was one of the earliest attempts to bring scholars of color together to address the law’s treatment of race from a self-consciously critical perspective.”
The student protestors at HLS received some pretty harsh criticism—even from those on the left. A lot of the criticism focused on the students’ desire that a black professor teach the course that Bell once taught. For example, Bayard Rustin, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, wrote in a letter to the editor published in the New York Times that the students’ refusal to be taught by a white professor was “nothing more than blatant racism.” He continued, “Blacks, as victims of racial discrimination, should be the first to reject the view that race can disqualify one from any particular pursuit.”
QUESTION: How do you feel about the students’ insistence that a black professor teach the course? Do you think they were right in wanting to learn from someone “who had not only acquired legal expertise in fighting racism but who had also experienced its dynamics individually and institutionally”? Or do you think they did nothing more than replicate the discourses that racial justice activists had fought—discourses that avow that you can know a person’s qualifications by knowing his race?
excerpted from Khiara M Bridges (2018, )Critical Race Theory: A Primer