Janet Dewart Bell

Janet Dewart Bell is a social justice activist with a doctorate in leadership and change from Antioch University. She founded the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society series at the New York University School of Law and is the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement and Blackbirds Singing: Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century and the co-editor (with Vincent M. Southerland) of Carving Out a Humanity and Race, Rights, and Redemption (all published by The New Press). An award-winning television and radio producer, she lives in New York City.

News and Reviews

The Nation

An excerpt from Lighting the Fires of Freedom

Colorlines

Included in “A Very Serious Roundup of Race–Focused Books Coming Out This Spring&rdquo

Book Riot

One of “29 Amazing New Books Coming in 2018”

Autostraddle

A “65 Queer and Feminist Books to Read in 2018” pick

Pages

Books by Janet Dewart Bell

Blackbirds Singing
Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-first Century

Janet Dewart Bell

Lighting the Fires of Freedom
African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Janet Dewart Bell

Race, Rights, and Redemption
The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory

Janet Dewart Bell, Vincent M. Southerland