Derrick Bell, the first tenured black law professor at Harvard Law School and one of the countrys leading civil rights authors, will be the keynote speaker at the 22nd annual West Virginia University Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Program Thursday, Jan. 11.

The service, organized by WVU s Center for Black Culture, will be held at 7 p.m. at Morgantowns Spruce Street United Methodist Church.

Along with the evening speech, WVU will host the annual Unity Breakfast at 8 a.m. Monday, Jan. 15, at the Mountainlair Ballrooms. This years breakfast will feature WVU College of Law Professor Vivian Hamilton as the keynote speaker. The MLK Achievement Award and MLK Scholarship will also be presented that morning.

In addition, a musical tribute to Kings life featuring Al Anderson and friends titledReminiscing the Dreamwill be shown at 2 p.m. Jan. 15 at the Metropolitan Theater, sponsored by the Community Coalition for Social Justice.

Bell is renowned as the professor who gave up his tenured position at Harvard in 1992 in protest of the universitys lack of minority women faculty members. Now a professor at New York Universitys School of Law, he has published several works, includingRace, Racism and American Law,a standard law school text first published in 1973 and now in its fifth edition.

Bell is credited as the founder of the Critical Race Theory, which emphasizes the socially constructed nature of race.

He was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pa., served in the U.S. Air Force in Korea and then graduated from the University of Pittsburgh Law School. He was recruited by Thurgood Marshall to serve as a litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1960 to 1965.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) the power to withhold federal funds from school districts operating on a segregated basis. Bell served as an administrator for HEW and was appointed to Harvard Law School faculty in 1969.

He left Harvard in 1981 to become the dean of the University of Oregon Law School. In 1986, he returned to Harvard, serving until 1992 when he resigned in protest. He has served as a visiting instructor at New York University School of Law since 1991.

In addition to his work in the classroom, Bell has written several books. The most recent work isThe Derrick Bell Reader (2005),edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. It is a compilation of issues that Bell has written about over his career, including affirmative action, black nationalism, legal education and ethics.

Bells other works include:Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004);Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (2002);Afrolantica Legacies (1998);Constitutional Conflicts (1997);Gospel Choirs, Psalms of Survival in Alien Land Called Home (1996);Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester (1994);Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992);andAnd We Are Not Saved: The Exclusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987).

In 1994, the storySpace Tradersfrom Bells book,Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism,was made into an HBO movie starring Robert Guillaume.

Unity breakfast speaker Hamilton received her bachelors degree at Yale and her law degree at Harvard. She has been at WVU since 2004 and previously served as the director of the Women and the Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law.

All events are free and open to the public, but RSVPs are being accepted for the Unity Breakfast by calling or emailing penny.kennedy@mail.wvu.edu or 304-293-7029.