From PS 70 to Derrick Bell:
One Black Child’s Education in Northern Segregation
John H. Armwood
Emory University School of Law, J.D. 1987
Hunter College, B.A. Political Science and Africana Studies, 1981
Abstract
This article offers a scholarly personal narrative of Northern school integration as experienced by one Black child in New York City between 1961 and 1981, situating that testimony within the historiography of de facto segregation in Northern urban school systems and the jurisprudential framework of Critical Race Theory. Drawing on direct experience of voluntary busing programs, institutional denial of academic recognition, and racially motivated violence in Staten Island public schools, the author argues that the Northern integration narrative—long cast as a liberal success story distinct from the violent Southern resistance documented in mainstream civil rights historiography—was, in structural terms, a system of managed exclusion enforced through institutional indifference. The article traces the author’s intellectual formation from Bedford-Stuyvesant through Hunter College’s open admissions period, where engagement with the Pan-Africanist scholarly tradition provided the analytical framework later confirmed and deepened through independent study of Derrick Bell’s work and formal engagement with it at Emory University School of Law. The article concludes that Critical Race Theory is not academic abstraction but juridical testimony—the formal legal language for what Black children in Northern cities already knew.
I. Introduction: The Other Integration Story
The dominant narrative of American school integration is a Southern story. It moves from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) through the Little Rock crisis of 1957, the Freedom Riders, Birmingham, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has heroes and villains rendered in high contrast: federal marshals and screaming mobs, Black children in their Sunday clothes walking lines of hatred into schoolhouses that the Constitution had finally said were theirs. It is a narrative that Americans of all political orientations have learned to recognize, if not always to honor.
What that narrative occludes is the Northern story—quieter in its violence, more bureaucratic in its mechanisms, and in many respects more instructive about the durability of American racial hierarchy precisely because it operated without the iconography of overt resistance. No governors stood in Northern schoolhouse doors. No fire hoses were deployed in Brooklyn or Staten Island. The exclusion was accomplished through zoning, through administrative discretion, through the differential application of standardized testing, and through the particular institutional silence that greets a bleeding Black child and hands him a towel.
This article is, among other things, a legal brief on behalf of that silence.
I am was a lawyer, a jazz historian, and a retired professor of law and criminal justice. I am also a Black child who was bused from Bedford-Stuyvesant to East Flatbush in 1961 at the age of eight, who was denied placement in a gifted class in Staten Island despite scoring at the highest levels on the Iowa achievement test, who had a glass lens driven into his eye by a white classmate and was sent home alone on a bus, and who stood in a Staten Island public school and, from that day forward, never again recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I arrived at Derrick Bell’s work not through academic curiosity but through the accumulated evidence of my own education—an education whose true curriculum was the systematic communication of my dispensability.
What follows is both testimony and analysis. I offer it in the conviction that the distinction between the two, in the context of American racial history, has always been somewhat artificial.
II. Bedford-Stuyvesant to East Flatbush: The Making of a Busing Family
I was born on January 2, 1953. My family lived at 814 Jefferson Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in a brownstone that represented the kind of Black working- and middle-class stability that postwar New York had produced and that the machinery of urban renewal and redlining was already beginning to dismantle.
My mother was a schoolteacher. My father had served as a civilian agent for the United States Army Counterintelligence Corps in the early years of World War II before enlisting, being deployed to Italy, and serving as a quartermaster. He retired from the Army at the end of the war as a First Lieutenant—a rank that, for a Black man in a segregated military, represented both genuine achievement and the precise ceiling that institutional racism had determined appropriate. He subsequently joined the Federal Protective Service. He was a man who had paid every price American citizenship demanded and who understood, with precise and unsentimental clarity, what he had and had not received in return.
George Armwood—a distant relative—was lynched on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1933, twenty years before I was born. I learned of this as an adult, through media coverage and through the participation of my cousin Henry Armwood in a conference panel on the lynching. George Armwood was the last recorded lynching in the state of Maryland. He was approximately twenty-three years old. He was never tried. He never arrived at his arraignment. He was not positively identified by his alleged victim. His guilt was never established in any court of law.
The decision my parents made in 1961 to enroll me in New York City’s voluntary busing program—to put their eight-year-old son on a bus from Bedford-Stuyvesant to East Flatbush—was made by people who understood precisely what America was and chose to demand its stated promises anyway. My mother had taught me an assimilationist model my whole life—not out of naïveté but out of a disciplined and loving faith that the institutions of American life could be made to honor their stated promises if Black people performed excellence within them.
I had attended PS 70 in Bedford-Stuyvesant through the second grade. My mother had taught me to read before I began kindergarten. PS 70 was the world I knew: my neighborhood, my community, the unremarkable comfort of belonging.
The first day at PS 198 in East Flatbush was an education of a different kind.
As the bus arrived, parents were gathered on the sidewalk. They spat on us as we got off. I was eight years old. No school administrator was present. No official of any kind had been deployed to receive the bus children. The absence was its own communication.
There were three other Black children dropped from the bus at PS 198 that morning. None of them were assigned to my class. I was alone in my classroom—the only Black student, the only bus child.
At lunch, walking outside to the playground, a boy I had never seen before came down the steps toward me and asked me if I was a nigger. I told him I didn’t know, because I had never heard the word before. I kept walking down the steps into the playground.
That evening I went to my father. We were in the kitchen of our brownstone at 814 Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn 21, New York—the Monday after Labor Day, September 1961, the same day the parents had spat at us on the sidewalk. I asked my father if I was a nigger.He was measured. He was not surprised. He was not angry. What happened on that sidewalk and on those playground steps was, in his measured assessment, typically American. It was what he had known all of his life. He had always made me watch Malcolm X on television. He once said: “Malcolm poked his finger in the eye of white hypocrisy.” He answered me fully and honestly that evening in the kitchen, without condescension and without false comfort.
I want to be precise about what I did and did not understand after that conversation. I did not arrive at PS 198 that morning with a racial identity in any conscious sense. I did not know how to distinguish white students from Black students, white teachers from Black teachers. PS 198 began to install that taxonomy in a single day. But I would not say that any education was completed that day. What I felt was hurt and profound confusion. At PS 70 I had been a standout student. To have that identity stripped away and replaced, in a single morning, by something I had no framework to understand was not clarifying. It was horrible.
I remained at PS 198 through early March the third grade, where my teacher was Ms. Cooper. In early October 1961, Ms. Cooper conducted class elections. There had been nominations for class President, and now she was moving to Vice President. I raised my hand. I wanted to nominate a classmate—a white child who had been kind to me in those first weeks. As I raised my hand, my classmate looked at me and smiled. Ms. Cooper looked at me too. She was smiling as well—until she spoke.
“The bus children are not ready to participate in class elections.”
The room erupted in loud laughter. I held back my tears. It was profoundly humiliating. That evening I told my parents what had happened. I knew they were not happy. But they did not react. I offer this as my own supposition: I believe they understood themselves to be powerless.
I want to be precise about what Ms. Cooper did. She did not tell me I had violated a procedural rule. She created, in front of every child in that room, a formal civic category—bus children—and assigned to that category a specific incapacity for democratic participation. She did this in a public school classroom in New York City in October 1961, seven years after Brown v. Board of Education. She did it because nothing in her institutional environment had ever suggested that she should do otherwise.
III. Staten Island and the Architecture of Exclusion
On March 8, 1962, my family moved from 814 Jefferson Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant to 265 Pelton Avenue on Staten Island. I was nine years old, in the third grade. The following Monday morning, my mother took me to PS 45 to register for school. My father was not present. It was the two of us—a Black schoolteacher and her son—walking into a public school building to claim what the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and a set of documented Iowa achievement test scores all said was ours.
The Iowa test had been administered by Ms. Cooper at PS 198 in Brooklyn. The registration was handled by the Assistant Principal, whose name I do not remember. What I remember is the room, and my mother standing in it, and what happened when the Assistant Principal reviewed my scores. She said they were impossible.
Not insufficient. Not in need of verification. Impossible. She was not evaluating my scores against a standard and finding them wanting. She was evaluating them against her conception of what a Black child was capable of producing and finding them inconsistent with that conception. My mother protested. She was a schoolteacher who knew precisely what those scores represented. The Assistant Principal was unmoved. I was placed in the second track—one level below the Intellectually Gifted Class.
I was standing in that room while this happened. I watched my mother fight and lose. What I felt was cheated. Something had been taken from me that the evidence said was mine.
PS 45 was an overwhelmingly white school. In the entire school I was aware of perhaps five or six Black students. I remained in the second track from third grade through sixth grade—approximately four years during which I sat one administrative decision away from the education the Iowa scores said I had earned. When I reached seventh grade and transferred to Prall Junior High School 27—the same school where my mother taught—I was placed in the gifted students class. The institution relented, finally, when my mother’s professional authority could no longer be separated from the building in which she exercised it.
Derrick Bell would later give me the language for this. He called it interest convergence—the principle that racial progress occurs in America not when justice demands it but when the interests of white institutions align with the interests of Black people. At Prall Junior High School, the interests finally converged. The convergence had nothing to do with my Iowa scores. It had everything to do with institutional self-interest.
IV. The Gary Feline Incident
I attended Richmondtown Preparatory School, a fully private institution receiving no government subsidy, from the ninth grade through my graduation in May 1971. I was the only Black student in my class from the third grade through the twelfth. There was never a classmate who shared my experience. There was never anyone in that room who knew what it felt like to be me.
My junior year was when things got really bad. Before class each afternoon, my classmates would chant a racial slur, nigger, nigger, nigger until the teacher walked in. Gary Feline, Mike Lee, and Nick Shilasee were the worst that I can remember. One day in early October I yelled out for them to stop. After class, as I was leaving the room, a senior named Sal de Falco who had been standing outside hooked my arms from behind. My books went flying. Gary Feline punched me in my left eye. The punch broke my glasses and sent glass into my eye.
Someone brought me a towel. I was allowed to call my mother. She told me to meet her at the HMO clinic.
I waited at the bus stop on the street across from the school. City bus number 113, Richmond Road, ran every thirty minutes. I waited approximately twenty minutes. Then I rode for another twenty to twenty-five minutes, alone, blood dripping from my eye with glass in it. No one helped me.
My eye was bandaged when I arrived at the clinic. It remained bandaged for nearly three weeks. Gary Feline may have been suspended for a day—I heard this but cannot confirm it. No police were called. No one from the school’s administration ever addressed what had happened to me in any conversation I can remember. Gary Feline, Mike Lee, Nick Shilasee, and Sal de Falco never apologized. No one treated what had happened as a significant event.
That institutional verdict is the closing argument of this section. Not the punch. Not the glass. Not the towel. Not the twenty-minute wait on the street with blood on my face. The closing argument is that none of it rose, in the institutional judgment of Richmondtown Preparatory School, to the level of a significant event.
I felt totally alienated after the incident and began spending time with the students at the school who existed outside its dominant social order: Debbie Alterisio, my closest friend; her boyfriend Carl Neiman; Evan Wilber; and Kevin O’Hare, a red-haired boy a year younger than me who also refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Around the time of the Gary Feline incident, a teacher ordered me to recite the Pledge. I told him—incorrectly, as I now understand—that I had a Constitutional First Amendment right not to be compelled to speak. The legal claim was wrong. Richmondtown was a private institution, and the state action required to trigger constitutional protection was absent. But the teacher went to the Headmaster, and both Kevin O’Hare and I were permitted to step out of class during the Pledge ritual. The result was correct even though the legal theory was not. I had instinctively reached for the Constitution as a shield, encoding in legal language what I had been living since 1961: that I would not perform allegiance to a country whose institutions had demonstrated, repeatedly and in detail, that my safety and dignity were negotiable.
V. Hunter College and the Architecture of Understanding
I graduated from Richmondtown Preparatory School in May 1971 and entered Hunter College in September of that year. The journey was not merely geographical but epistemological. I had spent nine years in an institution that chanted a racial slur at me before afternoon classes, allowed glass to be punched into my eye and called it insignificant. I had been expelled me from an Explorer Post for saying the Vietnam War was immoral, and permitted a teacher to wrap a yellow ribbon around my head and laugh while thirty white students laughed with him. I had navigated all of this with the intellectual tools available to me—my father’s measured counsel, the Malcolm X autobiography I had read on my own in high school, Sartre, Fanon, Nkrumah, Mbiti—but without an institutional framework that could explain structurally what was being done to me and why.
Hunter College gave me that framework.
On my first day of registration, a young man pointed me toward Hunter’s Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies and its Black Student Union. I signed up for Black Political Thought, taught by the department chairman, Professor Tilden LeMelle. That same afternoon I attended a Black Student Union orientation hosted by Professor John Henrik Clarke—one of the founding figures of the Pan-Africanist scholarly tradition.
But the moment that changed everything came from an unexpected source. Gil Noble was one of only two Black news hosts on New York City television at that time. He was a weekend news anchor—conservative, proper, impeccably turned out, a figure who embodied in his television presentation everything that my mother had spent my childhood telling me was the path: integration, achievement, assimilation, the performance of competence within the dominant institutional order.
Standing at that podium at Hunter College, Gil Noble was someone else entirely. He spoke about growing up in Harlem. He spoke about the day he encountered Malcolm X speaking on the corner of 125th Street and 8th Avenue, and what that encounter had done to him—how it had broken open the assimilationist framework he had been operating within and replaced it with a Pan-Africanist consciousness that could actually account for what he saw around him every day.
It hit me like a brick in the chest.
What Noble’s speech revealed was the central contradiction of my upbringing. My mother had taught me assimilationism my whole life—not out of naïveté but out of a disciplined and loving faith that the institutions of American life could be made to honor their stated promises if Black people performed excellence within them. She had put me on the bus to PS 198 in 1961 believing that. She had fought the Assistant Principal at PS 45 believing that. She had pushed until Prall Junior High finally placed me in the gifted class, believing that. But the system had answered every one of those beliefs with silence, dismissal, or laughter. Gil Noble—standing at that podium looking exactly like the assimilationist model’s highest achievement—said: I know. I tried it too. And then I heard Malcolm X on 125th Street.
I took eleven courses in Hunter’s Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies. I was directly mentored by Professor Myrna Bain, a political scientist who taught Afro-American Literature, Afro-Caribbean Literature, African Literature, and Black Women in Literature and Politics. Her door was always open. Students would sit in her office into the evening, arguing, reading, thinking. She battled with the dean over campus issues—on one occasion I placed myself physically between them because I could not afford to lose her. Thirty-six years later, in 2007, I contacted her to help one of my own college students. She obliged without hesitation. She was my model as a professor.
I was mentored by Tilden LeMelle, whose Black Political Thought course gave me my first systematic framework for understanding the relationship between race, power, and institutional structure. I was mentored by James Haughton—founder of Fight Back, a Black labor organization whose memorial now stands at the Schomburg Center in Harlem—who had been organizing Black workers since the 1940s and had worked alongside Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to integrate the businesses on 125th Street. Haughton taught me the intersection of race and labor. He also secured me a position in customer service at the Consolidated Edison Company of New York—an act of mentorship in its most concrete form. And I was shaped, in ways less direct but no less significant, by John Henrik Clarke himself, one of the great synthesizers of the Pan-Africanist intellectual tradition.
The intellectual canon I encountered in those classrooms—Clarke, Fanon, Rodney, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Cabral, Nkrumah, Mbiti—was essentially the founding library of radical Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial thought assembled in a single department.
By my junior year I had been elected Chairman of the Black Student Union by unanimous vote. When we discovered that student funds in Hunter’s SEEK department had been fraudulently diverted—cutting the stipends of poor students who depended on them—I co-led a direct action in response. A small group of students, fewer than ten in total, drawn from the Black Student Union, Puerto Rican student groups, the Caribbean Students Union, the Haitian Club, and the white radical Attica Brigade, occupied the office of President Jacqueline Grennan Wexler. I had distributed a letter to the college faculty detailing the misuse of funds. President Wexler called me into her office. The funds were restored.
The participating students represented overlapping self-interests rather than disinterested solidarity. The Attica Brigade were young white radicals who opposed the Vietnam War as a neo-colonial enterprise and who would subsequently be the type who opposed Ronald Reagan’s systematic dismantling of the social safety net that protected them alongside everyone else. Their participation illustrated Bell’s interest convergence thesis precisely: cross-racial coalition emerging not from the transcendence of self-interest but from its honest recognition at a specific institutional moment.
What Hunter College gave me, above all, was the analytical framework that transformed my personal history from a series of random wounds into a coherent pattern of structural violence. Every incident I had experienced—the spitting parents, Ms. Cooper’s civic category of bus children, the Assistant Principal’s “impossible,” Mr. Jacobson’s yellow ribbon, Gary Feline’s punch, the towel, the thirty-minute bus—was not random. It was the operation of a system built, maintained, and defended with extraordinary consistency across institutions and across decades. Black Studies gave me the language to say that. Fanon gave me the psychology. Nkrumah gave me the history. Clarke gave me the scope. Haughton gave me the labor dimension. Bain gave me the literary and political tradition of Black women’s resistance.
I graduated from Hunter College in 1981 with a degree in Political Science and Africana Studies. I moved to Atlanta in 1984 to attend Emory University School of Law. I brought all of it with me.
VI. Coming to Grips with Derrick Bell
I had been reading Derrick Bell before I arrived at Emory. His Race, Racism and the Law and his article in the Harvard Law Review—“Forward: The Civil Rights Chronicles”—had already shaped the way I understood the relationship between legal doctrine and racial hierarchy. Bell’s framework was not new to me when I walked into Professor Frank Alexander’s Critical Jurisprudence class at Emory Law School in 1987. What was new was the institutional resistance I encountered when I tried to engage with it seriously.
Professor Alexander was regarded by some as the most liberal member of the Emory Law faculty. When I raised Bell’s work in his Jurisprudence class, Alexander attempted to dismiss it—questioning whether Bell even had a coherent jurisprudence or underlying legal philosophy. I found this not merely wrong but revealing. The dismissal of Bell by a self-described liberal white law professor was itself a demonstration of Bell’s central thesis: that the commitment of white liberal institutions to racial justice is contingent on that commitment’s cost to white institutional interests.
I wrote a paper in response. Its title was “Coming to Grips with Derrick Bell: The Civil Rights Lawyer as Sisyphus.” The Sisyphus framing was my own analytical choice—not Bell’s characterization of himself or his work. I reached for Camus deliberately. Professor Alexander was steeped in the European philosophical tradition, and I understood that if I wanted my argument about Bell’s jurisprudence to be taken seriously within that institutional setting, I needed to provide a Eurocentric hook. The actual intellectual tradition I was drawing on—the long lineage of African American, Caribbean and African thought running from David Walker and Martin Delaney through C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and John Henrik Clarke—was already present in the paper. But I translated it into the language of Greek myth and French existentialism to get it through the institutional door.
That strategic translation is itself a demonstration of Bell’s thesis. The Black scholar operating within white institutional spaces must render his work in the idiom of white intellectual legitimacy to receive recognition within those spaces. The form of my argument performed the argument’s content.
Professor Timothy Terrell—a more intellectually generous colleague of Alexander’s—gave me an environment where I did not need that kind of translation. In his Advanced Constitutional Theory course, the final examination was open book, one question, eight hours. My response was titled “The Jazz Quartet: A Metaphorical Resolution to the Perceived Incompatibility of the Concepts of Liberty and Equality.” I argued that the jazz quartet—in which individual expression and communitarian obligation coexist in dynamic, productive tension—offered a more adequate model for constitutional democracy than either Rawlsian liberalism or Dworkinian rights theory. Terrell gave me the highest grade in the class. My twin sons, Benjamin and Garrett, were born on July 10, 1987, in the weeks following my Emory graduation.
I met Derrick Bell in person in February 1989 at Harvard Law School, two years after graduating Emory. Drake A. Colley—a jazz musician and third-year Harvard Law student who had conceived and organized the symposium—invited me to moderate a panel discussion on African-American Classical Music as part of Harvard Law School’s first symposium on “Black Music and the Law,” sponsored by the Harvard Black Law Students Association and the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law. The Harvard Law Record covered the event in its March 10, 1989 issue. It was at that symposium that I met Derrick Bell. Bell attempted to recruit me to pursue an LLM degree at Harvard Law School. I declined. But the encounter confirmed what the paper had already established: that my independent engagement with Bell’s work had produced something he recognized as serious.
Bell’s framework—particularly his principle of interest convergence and what he called “involuntary sacrifice”—was not for me an academic abstraction. It was the retrospective legal vocabulary for a childhood I had already lived. The parents who spat on the PS 198 sidewalk were defending institutional interest, not violating it. The Assistant Principal who called my Iowa scores impossible was making a judgment consistent with her institution’s actual priorities, not an error. Ms. Cooper was enforcing the rules, not violating them. Gary Feline was the logical expression of an environment that had communicated, daily and systematically, that the only Black student in the class was there on probation.
Interest convergence explains why the gifted class at Prall Junior High finally opened to me when my mother joined its faculty. The institution’s interest in a cooperative relationship with a faculty member converged with my interest in an appropriate academic placement. Justice had nothing to do with it. My Iowa scores had been sufficient for years. What changed was the cost-benefit calculation.
VII. George Armwood, 1933, and the Long Arc
George Armwood was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, on October 18, 1933. He was approximately twenty-three years old. A mob of a thousand broke down the jailhouse doors with battering rams, dragged him out by a noose around his neck, stabbed him, beat him, hanged him until dead, returned his body to the courthouse, hanged it from a telephone pole, and burned it. He had been accused of assaulting a seventy-one-year-old white woman. He was never tried. He never arrived at his arraignment. He was not positively identified by his alleged victim. His guilt was never established in any court of law. He was the last recorded lynching in the state of Maryland.
I learned about George Armwood as an adult—through media coverage and through the participation of my cousin Henry Armwood in a conference panel on the lynching. He is a distant relative. The surname we share is not coincidence—it is the thread that connects my life to his death, my legal career to his murder, my paper on Derrick Bell to the specific, documented, unremedied injustice that Bell spent his life arguing the legal system was structurally incapable of addressing.
Bell argued that effective remedies for racial harm will not be granted when those remedies impose significant costs on white institutional interests. George Armwood’s murder imposed no cost whatsoever on the white institutional interests of Somerset County, Maryland in 1933. No one was prosecuted. No one was convicted. The mob of a thousand returned to their lives. Bell would have recognized every institutional decision in that sequence. The law did not fail George Armwood. The law performed exactly as it was designed to perform for a Black man in Maryland in 1933—which is to say, it performed the function Bell identified in the Dred Scott decision’s most honest moment: Blacks have no rights that white men are bound to respect.
I am not George Armwood. I survived my education. I earned my degrees, practiced my law, directed my festival, lectured at my universities, moderated my symposia, and sat across from Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School while he tried to recruit me to a future I had already chosen differently. The institutions that handed me a towel and put me on a bus did not destroy me. But survival is not justice. And psychological tools are not economic opportunity.
I do not offer this narrative in the hope that America will fundamentally change its racial structure. I agree with Derrick Bell that racism is permanent—not as a counsel of despair but as an analytical conclusion grounded in the historical evidence. Bell’s leaky boat metaphor, developed in And We Are Not Saved, captures the position with precision: we are in a leaky boat heading toward a waterfall. We do not abandon the boat because there is nowhere else to go. We do not pretend the waterfall is not there because it is. We paddle. We bail. We fix what holes we can fix as time permits. And we find meaning in the struggle itself rather than in the fantasy of a safe shore that the evidence does not support.
David Walker understood this. Martin Delaney understood this. And by May 8, 1967, Martin Luther King understood this. In an interview with NBC News correspondent Sander Vanocur at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the church where he had been baptized, where his parents had married, and where eleven months later his funeral would be held—King acknowledged that his dream had turned into a nightmare. “I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and a lot of agonizing moments,” he told Vanocur, “and I’ve come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a little solid realism.” The man who had spoken from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 with the confidence of inevitable moral progress had arrived, four years later, at Bell’s racial realism—not surrender, not silence, but the honest acknowledgment that structural racism in America is not a problem that moral suasion alone can solve.
That spirit—Bell’s, Walker’s, Delaney’s, King’s—is visible today in the broad coalition of Americans, including significant numbers of white citizens, who oppose the racism and militarism of the current political moment. Bell’s interest convergence theory explains this coalition without romanticizing it: these Americans are not acting out of racial altruism but because their interests converge with the interests of Black and brown Americans who have been resisting racial authoritarianism since the founding. The convergence is real. Its political force is real. And Bell’s framework also reminds us of its structural limits: cross-racial coalitions in America hold only as long as the cost of solidarity remains acceptable to white institutional actors. When genuine redistribution and genuine structural transformation are placed on the table, the coalition’s durability becomes the central question—and history provides no grounds for optimism about the answer.
The merging of culture, family, and history gave me the necessary tools to overcome the psychological damage of Euro-American racism—though it did not provide me with the economic opportunity that was a given for whites, and even for contemporary Asians of my generation, with my credentials.
That is not the ending I would have chosen. It is the ending the evidence requires. And it is the only honest answer to the question that Derrick Bell spent his career posing and that I have spent my life living: not whether resistance is futile—it is not—but what resistance actually costs, who is asked to pay, and why, knowing all of this, we push the boulder anyway.
About the Author
John H. Armwood is a retired lawyer, jazz historian, and professor of law and criminal justice based in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Africana Studies from Hunter College (1981) and a J.D. from Emory University School of Law (1987). He practiced entertainment law in Atlanta from 1988 to 2004, served as Director of the Atlanta Jazz Festival (1991–1996), and hosted a jazz radio program on WCLK-FM 91.9 for twenty-two years. He has lectured on jazz history and African American music at Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, Hunter College, the 92nd Street Y, and the High Museum of Art. He moderated the first Harvard Law School symposium on Black Music and the Law (1989) and taught law and criminal justice at Clark Atlanta University and Westwood College.
Selected Notes
Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and the Law (1980).
Derrick Bell, “Forward: The Civil Rights Chronicles,” 99 Harvard Law Review 4 (1985).
Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (1963).
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938).
John H. Armwood, “Coming to Grips with Derrick Bell: The Civil Rights Lawyer as Sisyphus,” Critical Jurisprudence, Emory University School of Law, April 24, 1987 (unpublished paper on file with author).
Martin Luther King Jr., interview by Sander Vanocur, NBC News, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, May 8, 1967. Broadcast as part of “After Civil Rights: Black Power,” NBC News Special, June 11, 1967.
Drake A. Colley, letter to John H. Armwood, November 28, 1988 (on file with author).
Drake A. Colley, letter to John H. Armwood, March 1, 1989 (on file with author).
Dawn Ross, “Legal System Strikes Sour Note for Black Musicians,” Harvard Law Record, March 10, 1989, p. 3.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Lynching of George Armwood, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_George_Armwood (last visited April 2026).
