Bell's innovative teaching style emphasizes student participation, and his courses are designed to resolve what is regarded as the teacher-student contradiction in which both are simultaneously teachers and students. Assigned to Mississippi in the midst of the civil rights movement, Bell represented blacks in the hundreds of suits dismantling legal segregation in schools and public facilities. In 1980, he resigned his faculty position at Harvard to become Dean of the University Credited with advancing the academic study of race and racism as a legal issue, in 1973 Bell authored what has become a standard law school text, Race, Racism and American Law . Stretching the bounds of legal discourse, he utilized allegorical fiction in works intended to make the intersections of law and race more accessible to the public. During the month of February, the Nassau Community College Black History Month Committee is presenting a month of programs and events as a tribute to the black experience.
All programs are free, open to the public and accessible to the disabled.