Stimulating Conversation

January 17, 2006 Issue

During “A Conversation with Judge Robert L. Carter and Professor Derrick Bell” at Pitt’s School of Law Jan. 12 before an audience of students, faculty, and community leaders, the two men talked about the early years of the Civil Rights movement and the small battles they personally fought for equal treatment with Whites.

For example, Carter (right) recalled challenging, as a high school student in suburban Newark, N.J., a policy that limited Blacks to swimming in the school’s pool on Fridays only; the pool then would be drained and refilled for White students to swim in the following week. Citing a New Jersey Supreme Court antidiscrimination ruling, Carter insisted on swimming with an otherwise all-White class.

Bell, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is a 1957 Pitt law school graduate, worked as a young man with the NAACP. He and other Black NAACP members would visit Pittsburgh restaurants and other establishments to see how they would be treated. Bell recalled being unable to get anyone to take his order at a local beer garden. “That situation told me in very direct terms that there was racism out there,” he said. “Young people today don’t have those direct rejections.”

Though racism in the United States isn’t as blatant today, it still exists, Bell and Carter agreed. “When we talk about progress,” Bell said, “we need to put ‘progress’ in quotation marks.” Carter added, “Blacks are going to have to stir things up. It only takes a few” activists to make a difference. Bell urged students in the audience to “provide examples that others can follow.”

—Patricia Lomando White