these school cases. Throughout the South, often the winning rulings and the following desegregation caused white flight, and ultimately keeping the schools segregated. Later, as an academic, these practical results led him to conclude that "racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it." Academic career Bell spent the second half of his career working in academia until his passing in 2011. Throughout this period of time, he worked at multiple prestigious law schools while simultaneously developing his theories about race, writing multiple books which are now considered the foundation of the field of critical race theory. Bell spent a lot of his time creating more inclusive faculty within institutions such as USC, Harvard, and NYU. Bell was known to be respectful of all beliefs and his class was described by his students to be the "least indoctrinated class" in their Law school. Bell would give his students the most freedom to reach their own conclusions and to build their own arguments that could be reasonable, despite their political beliefs. USC Law School Bell's first law faculty position began in 1967 at the USC Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California. There, he succeeded Martin Levine as executive director of the new Western Center on Law and Poverty. Among his notable cases was a class action suit against the Los Angeles Police Department on behalf of the city's black residents. During Bell's directorship, the Western Center's work was recognized in 1971 with a trophy bestowed by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California. Harvard Law School In 1969, Black Harvard Law School students helped to get Bell hired. They had protested for a minority faculty member and Derek Bok hired Bell to teach as a lecturer. Bok promised that Bell would be "the first but not the last" of his Black hires. In 1971, Bell became Harvard Law's first Black tenured professor. During his time at Harvard, Bell established a new course in civil rights law, published a celebrated case book, Race, Racism and American Law, and produced a steady stream of law review articles. University of Oregon School of Law In 1980, Bell started a five-year tenure as the Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. There, he also taught a course on Race,