Noted civil rights lawyer and law professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr. will deliver the biennial Damon J. Keith Lecture at the Wayne State University Law School on Thursday, October 12, 2006. The program begins at 6:30 p.m. in the School’s Spencer M. Partrich Auditorium, 471 W. Palmer St., Detroit.

The topic of Professor Bell’s lecture will be “The Civil Rights Lawyers’ Role in a Time of Mortal Crisis.” The lecture is free and open to the public and will be preceded by a reception with Professor Bell at 6 p.m.

Derrick Bell has been a visiting professor at New York University School of Law since 1991. Prior to that he was on the faculty of law at Harvard Law School, where he was the school’s first tenured black professor. He also served as dean of the University of Oregon Law School from 1981 to 1986.

In the 1960s, Bell was recruited by Thurgood Marshall to work as a litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In addition, he served as executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty at the University of Southern California and as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

A compilation of Bell’s writings, The Derrick Bell Reader, was published in 2005. The preceding year his book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board and the Unfulfilled Quest for Racial Justice, was published by Oxford University Press. He is the author of six additional books. His textbook on Civil Rights is in its fifth edition. Bell is also known for his allegorical stories featuring the fictional heroine Geneva Crenshaw. His story, “Space Traders” from his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well was produced as an HBO film in 1994 and featured Robert Guillaume.

The Damon J. Keith Lecture is sponsored by the Damon J. Keith Law Collection of African American Legal History. The collection is dedicated to recording the history of African American lawyers and judges. The Collection is a partnership between the Law School and Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs at WSU.

Parking for the lecture is available in Structure #1, across from the Law School, for $3.50. For more information, please phone (313) 577-6530.