lani-guinier

Tributes in Memory of Professor Derrick Bell

Professor Lani Guinier
Harvard Law School
October 7, 2011

You would always get straight talk from Professor Derrick Bell.

When I was a young lawyer, barely six years out of law school, I was at a cross roads. I could stay in the Department of Justice and take a position in the criminal section of the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division or I could join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. (LDF) as a staff attorney. The LDF job beckoned me. I had seen myself as a civil rights lawyer since I witnessed a courageous LDF Fund lawyer, Constance Baker Motley, head erect, walk through an angry mob in order to assert James Meredith’s rights to enroll in the University of Mississippi. I wanted to follow in Constance Baker Motley’s footsteps.

Despite this idea which I carried around in my head, I was reluctant to leave the Justice Department. I thought that was where I would get helpful training as a litigator. Truth be told, some part of me wanted to stay at DOJ because I was attached to my DOJ “badge”. It gave me an identity as someone who deserved respect. It was my shield and my sword. Whenever I travelled, I could pull that badge out of its leather embossed case and immediately the airport officials or the clerk’s office in a Southern courthouse would treat me with respect.

I knew I needed to turn to Professor Derrick Bell for advice. Professor Bell had given up a position as the only black lawyer in the entire Justice Department in the 1950s. The DOJ wanted him to pledge loyalty to the Department of Justice at the expense of his public loyalty to the community from which he had emerged. DOJ demanded that he resign his membership in the NAACP. Derrick would have none of it. And while I did not face as stark a choice, Derrick knew the decision I should make. His response was swift. “Go work at LDF,” he declared. “You say you want to be a civil rights lawyer? Well then you need to go and mix it up with real people.”

Derrick Bell was reminding me that the work of a civil rights lawyer was not about the lawyer’s credentials. It was about the lawyer’s commitment to her clients. It was not about who you sat with. It’s who you stood with. Of course he was right. He would make the choice he told me to make again and again. Derrick always chose community over credentials.