Word: belled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What the slaves did with the Bible is the key to understanding how Bell's otherwise radically pessimistic work nonetheless exhibits an unabiding faith in redemption. As historians such as Lawrence Levine have shown, the Black slaves reconstructed a text designed to justify their servitude into one that brought about spiritual liberation...
...Bell, a professor at Harvard Law School, abandons the standard language of legal discourse, employing instead the device of parable to make his points about race, law, religion, and the intersection of the three. Through dialogues between his fictional characters Geneva Crenshaw, a civil rights lawyer who has tapped into an otherworldly body of Black demi-gods known as the Celestial Curia, and her Black law professor friend, Bell lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding the legal process--a way that is uniquely Black...
JUST AS Blacks took the white man's religion and made it their own, Bell argues, it is necessary for them to take the white man's law and make it Black folks'. As Crenshaw says in the book's final chapter, "If our slave ancestors could do so much with the Bible, we should be able to do no less with the Constitution...
After redefining the white man's words, the slaves hurled them at him from all corners of the plantations with raised voices. The Negro spirituals became what Bell calls "a theology in song," and everywhere it challenged those masters who professed to believe in the Bible most deeply...
...Bell is searching for a "theology of litigation" less concerned with victory in individual cases than with the morality of the arguments which civil rights lawyers proffer in public. His argument is that Blacks need to define as sacred the American legal system and turn its courtrooms into a forum for Black religion to voice itself. In this way the Constitution, a document initially designed to protect slavery and since used to legitimize Black oppression, could be redefined as an instrument of liberation...