Derrick Bell Honored with 2026 MLK Humanitarian Award
The late Derrick Bell, an influential full-time visiting professor of constitutional law at NYU Law for two decades, has been named a posthumous recipient of the 2026 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award by NYU. Each year, the MLK Humanitarian Award is conferred to a humanitarian within the NYU community who embodies and exemplifies the characteristics championed by King—“a vision of peace, persistence in purpose, and inspirational action.” On February 5, the prize will be accepted on Bell’s behalf by social-justice activist and scholar Janet Dewart Bell, his wife, during MLK Week at NYU, which commemorates King’s 1961 visit to the University’s former Bronx campus.
As a lawyer, civil rights activist, and legal scholar, Bell was a groundbreaking figure. Early in his career, he worked at the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department, the only African American among thousands of lawyers. He left when the government asked him to resign his membership of the NAACP, and then went on to become first assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) under Thurgood Marshall, supervising more than 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi. After entering academia, Bell wrote extensively about the progress of racial reform in the United States across a range of genres, from fiction to legal analysis to autobiography. His writings, arguing that racism is deeply entrenched within the nation’s laws and institutions, helped form the critical race theory movement in the 1970s, and shaped public policy and debate. Among his books are the widely used casebook Race, Racism and American Law and collections of short stories and fables that explored issues of racism, including Faces at the Bottom of the Well and And We Are Not Saved.
Bell’s legacy, which includes mentoring generations of law school students, is commemorated annually at NYU Law with the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society. The lecture series, which marked its 30th year in 2025, invites leading scholars and experts to the Law School to explore a broad range of contemporary racial issues. Past presenters of the lecture have included Sherrilyn Iffil ’87, former president and director-counsel of LDF; Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; and Bell himself.
“Yes, Derrick rocked the boat,” said John Sexton, then-president of NYU and dean emeritus of NYU Law, during Bell’s 2011 memorial service. “He also shook the tree, yielding fruits of exceptional scholarship that nourished the discipline of law and thousands of colleagues, students and friends, whom he inspired to teach each other the law and to stand up, speak out, and find joy and satisfaction in stretching the boundaries of justice.”
