Having already generated much attention among progressive academics and activists, Bell reentered the debate over hiring practices at Harvard in 1990, when he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school appointed a black woman professor to its tenured faculty. At the time, of the university's 60 tenured professors, only three were black and five were women. The school had never had a black woman on the tenured staff.
Students held vigils and protests in solidarity with the man who would sacrifice $120,000 in his fight to diversify the campus. Critics, including faculty members, called Bell's methods counterproductive, and Harvard administration officials insisted they had already made enormous inroads in hiring: 45 percent of the faculty hired in the last decade was either female or black. They had been trying to recruit a black women, the officials said, but the pool of black women scholars was very small, and the interuniversity competition for the candidates was fierce. Besides, the black woman Bell wanted Harvard to hire was a visiting professor at the school, and visiting professors, according to a three-year-old rule, were ineligible for tenure.
To some observers, Bell's lament about Harvard amounted to a call for the school to lower its academic qualifications in the quest to mold a diversified faculty on the campus. But Bell argued that critics of diversity invariably underplay the value of a faculty that is broadly reflective of society, and, more importantly, that the credentials demanded by institutions like Harvard perpetuate the domination of white, well-off, middle-aged men. As he commented in the Boston Globe, "Let's look at a few qualifications beyond grades--say civil rights experience ... that might allow [a chance at a tenured teaching position for] more folks here who, like me, maybe didn't go to the best law school but instead have made a real difference in the world."
Bell's writings reflect the anger and disappointment of a man whose dramatic protest tactics, at least in recent years, have failed to bring about a desired change. The allegorical "chronicles" in 1987's And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice and his 1992 publication, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism attempt to expose the transparency of nominal, virtually meaningless civil rights advances. "Racism is not a passing phase but a permanent feature of American life," the New York Times summarized. "Despite all the change over the years, [Bell maintains that] blacks are worse off and more subjugated than at any time since slavery."
In a conclusion that is particularly grim for a crusading civil rights lawyer, Bell claims that legal victories are hollow if society's mind-set remains unchanged. He often refers to the Brown v. Board of Education case as an example, claiming that the 1954 school desegregation decision by the Supreme Court was neutered when whites began to abandon public schools and flee the cities. In general, Bell judges that civil rights laws and decisions are worthless because America's white-dominated society continues to undermine black advancement while allowing racism to prevail.
One of the vignettes in Faces at the Bottom of the Well centers on a new black "homeland" for African Americans. Afrolantica, an island rising from the sea, is surrounded by air that is breathable only by people of color. Controversy arises in the story over whether blacks should move there to escape racial injustice. "The Space Traders," another tale in the metaphorical collection, offers harsh insights into the perceived worth of cultural diversity in the United States: in the story, aliens use the African American population as a pawn in a scheme that would free the United States from its economic and environmental woes. Though critics generally appreciated the sober vision of race offered by Bell in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, some argued that the author minimizes real advances made in the struggle for civil rights over the past four decades.
In 1992, Bell, who had taken a visiting professorship at New York University, was formally removed from the Harvard faculty. He maintained a high profile in the news arena throughout the year, though, as he negotiated a deal with filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin (of House Party fame) to adapt "The Space Traders" into a motion picture. Bell also lent his legal expertise to a PBS-TV project on the Declaration of Independence.
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