The Origins of Critical Race Theory
The People and Ideas That Created a Movement
The Origins of Critical Race Theory, (forthcoming in March 2025 from New York University Press), is the first of three exciting new books by Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith.
Weaving together the many sources of critical race theory, Martinez and Smith recount the origin story for one of the most insightful and controversial academic movements in U.S. history. In addition to introducing readers to the tenets and key insights of critical race theory, Martinez and Smith explore the lives and intellectual influences of the movement’s founders, shedding light on how the many components of critical race theory eventually formed into a movement.
Stay tuned for two additional books by Martinez and Smith published by Penn State University Press, and University of California Press, kicking off Cal UP's new series on CRT.
Martinez and Smith
A Writing Partnership
We did not set out to write a book together! At first, we thought this would be a single-authored book for Aja’s academic field of rhetoric and writing studies, one focused on a much narrower question concerning Derrick Bell’s writing process. Because of the controversy around CRT, Aja had many opportunities to speak to groups of academics and other learners about how Bell transformed academic arguments and insights from his law review articles into bestselling collections of science fiction short stories. Robert, as a historian, discovered that Bell had an archive at New York University that might help answer those questions about Bell’s writing process.
That question—How did Bell revise academic work to become more accessible to the public?—is what first drove Aja into the NYU archive that Robert had located. Because we are a married couple, Robert went along to help document whatever might be found. Although Aja was lucky enough to secure some travel funds, visiting New York City is expensive, so our first visit was short. Too short, as we were to soon discover; we encountered an archive that is meticulous, massive, and close to comprehensive, covering Bell’s writings—especially his correspondence—from the mid-1950s through the end of his life in 2011. In the archive, we entered a world of names, dates, and stories. We expected to encounter one person; we instead entered an entire world of relationships. At times, it felt as if Derrick Bell himself, with a broad smile, invited us into his home office for story hour with a CRT founder.
"Making extensive use of the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Papers at New York University, interviews with other crucial Critical Race scholars such as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, and a far-reaching use of interdisciplinary sources, Martinez and Smith provide comprehensive origin stories of Critical Race Theory in the Law...This original and all-encompassing work takes us down some important pathways as we train educators in all fields to understand the power of Critical Race Theory as we serve communities of color around issues of race, racism, and other forms of domination. Critical Race Scholars will be well served by this gift today and in the future."
—Daniel Solórzano, author of Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism
The Chapters
Chapter One
Our story begins with Derrick Bell and a particularly thrilling find in his archive: his law school application essay. In 1954, he was on a ship headed home from his year-long tour of US Air Force duty in Korea. In the same year that Bell decided to apply to the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, the US Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This launch point for chapter 1 immediately challenges bad-faith accusations that CRT is or ever has been communist, Marxist, or anti-American. Through the witness of Bell’s life as a service member, a devout Christian, and eventually a dedicated civil rights litigator in service to communities in the US South, we demonstrate how the tenets of permanence of race and racism, race as social construct, and commitment to social justice came to be.
Derrick Bell’s Law School Application Essay
Chapter Two
In the second chapter, we introduce readers to the storied lives of critical thinkers and cowriters Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. They each had full lives before meeting one another and deciding to research, write, and publish together. We explore how their unique combination of backgrounds, interests, and personal experiences produce an indelible, humanities-based, and storytelling-infused mark on CRT. Once teamed up, they have been an unstoppable force in the world of legal studies. Delgado, often cowriting with Stefancic, is the top-cited critical race legal scholar of all time. Their most successful contribution, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition, is still the best entry point for learners at all levels. As such, both Delgado’s and Stefancic’s life stories and their decision to write for popular audiences exemplify the tenets of accessibility, challenging dominant ideologies, interdisciplinarity, and commitment to social justice.
Jean Stefancic, Derrick Bell, and Richard Delgado at NYU
Chapter Three
During the spring of 1985, the student-led staff of the Harvard Law Review extended a major accolade to Derrick Bell, inviting him to write the foreword to the journal’s annual Supreme Court issue. The invitation provided Bell an opportunity, along with a featured platform, to do something different, something big. Through this venue, the world was introduced to Geneva Crenshaw. In the third chapter—through interviews, archival documents, and published accounts—we trace the various sources of the composite character of Geneva Crenshaw. We explore key moments in Bell’s life and trace influences and relationships, particularly with Black women, that propelled Bell toward developing the tenets of the permanence of race and racism, interest convergence, and interdisciplinarity.
Derrick Bell , James Meredith, and Constance Baker Motley
Chapter Four
The fourth chapter considers a variety of historical accounts of what led to the development of CRT, informed by frameworks like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept that became the CRT tenet intersectionality. We trace several strands of CRT’s history to flashpoint moments such as the 1983 Harvard Law School student protest and boycott resulting in the Alternative Course, the 1985 and 1987 critical legal studies (CLS) conferences, and Bell’s infamous 1986 incident at Stanford Law School. The chapter identifies several lesser-known contributions to the seedbed from which CRT grew, specifically tracing influences from other liberation movements, including the struggle for ethnic studies, informing the CRT tenet of interdisciplinarity. In this chapter, conflict between longtime LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg and Derrick Bell takes center stage. Helping explain the source of CRT’s tenet challenging dominant ideologies, we detail tensions between liberalism and Black liberation throughout the United States in the twentieth century, particularly in the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, and the legal studies field.
Harvard Law School student protest, 1984 Harvard Law School yearbook
Chapter Five
After a long process of coming into being, CRT finally gained a name in July 1989. Once the discipline, also a social movement, took shape, different groups approached it in very different ways. Scholars in various academic fields, especially in education, almost immediately began applying CRT’s insights. Not everyone was so positive. Critics of various sorts began lodging their assessments of CRT and its core commitments. This fifth chapter highlights some of these critiques, distinguishing good-faith, reasonable criticism from scholars like Randall Kennedy and from more recent political attacks from media manipulators, including the likes of Christopher Rufo. Throughout this chapter, we address the CRT tenets of the permanence of race and racism, interest convergence, challenge to dominant ideologies, and the centrality of the unique voices of people of color.
1989 Critical Race Theory Workshop Participants, Madison, WI
Conclusion
This book’s conclusion gestures toward new CRT directions in incorporating class analysis alongside racial critique, contemporary turns within legal studies toward storytelling and trans-disciplinarity, and the promise found in greater engagement with the humanities. Despite current challenges to CRT’s credibility, the movement’s deep rootedness in relationships of human concern is not easily overcome. The superficial word games of the current critiques can do their best; CRT is an idea that cannot be killed. Let’s get to it.
Cover of the Michigan Law Review special issue on legal storytelling
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Exploring race, religion, and indigeneity.
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