Renowned Law Professor and Civil Rights Activist Derrick Bell Gives Konefsky Lecture at Brooklyn College

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May 8, 2000

Renowned Law Professor and Civil Rights Activist Derrick Bell

Gives Konefsky Lecture at Brooklyn College

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Alice Newcomb-Doyle (718) 951-5882

Brooklyn, N.Y. -- Derrick Bell, the renowned author, lawyer, teacher, and civil rights activist, delivered the twenty-seventh annual Samuel J. Konefsky Lecture at the Brooklyn College Student Center on Monday, May 8, at 2 p.m. He spoke on "The Importance of Racism for Social Stability: Past, Present, and Future."

Bell is best known as the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, a position he gained in 1971 and relinquished in 1992, when he refused to return from a two-year, unpaid leave of absence he took to protest the absence of African American women on the faculty. Since 1991 he has been a visiting professor at New York University School of Law where he teaches constitutional law.

"Bell is one of the country's most powerful and influential voices on civil rights," said Vincent Fuccillo, chairperson of the Department of Political Science. "We are honored to have such a distinguished guest at this important event."

From 1980 to 1985 Bell served as Dean of the University of Oregon Law School. He has also served as executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty at the University of Southern California Law School, counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Bell is the author of several books, including Race, Racism, and American Law, published in 1973 and now in its third edition; and an autobiographical work, Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester.

The annual lecture is named for the late Samuel J. Konefsky, professor of political science at Brooklyn College for more than thirty-five years. Professor Konefsky was a major intellectual presence in the department and on campus beginning in the mid-1930s. He authored several critically acclaimed books, including Chief Justice Stone and the Supreme Court (1945) and The Constitutional World of Mr. Justice Frankfurter (1949).

Previous Konefsky lecturers include Alan M. Dershowitz, Brooklyn College class of 1959; the late Arthur Goldberg, former associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; and Gerald Gunther, Brooklyn College class of 1949, of Stanford Law School.

Brooklyn College, founded in 1930 and located on a twenty-six acre tree-lined campus in Flatbush, is one of the eleven senior colleges of the City University of New York. It enrolls 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students who are representative of the diverse population of Brooklyn and New York City. The school is nationally known for its core curriculum, which has been hailed as one of the "bright spots" in American higher education.
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