American civil rights activist Derrick Bell says Bermuda appears to be several steps ahead of the United States in dealing with race relations.

The well-known activist and inspirational author, Professor Bell came to the public's attention after he left a position as a tenured law professor at Harvard Law School when the university failed to appoint a woman of colour to the faculty.

He arrived in Bermuda on Saturday to speak at the Bermuda College on the invitation of friend and college president, Dr. Michael Orenduff.

Yesterday, Professor Bell took time out to talk to The Royal Gazette about his life's work and the importance of ethics in careers.

"You need a humble personality to be sensitive and concerned about race issues. The people I write about, King (Dr. Martin Luther King) for instance, was a great speaker but he was a very humble person; a great talent but not overbearing at all."

A visiting law professor at New York University for the past 12 years, the soft-spoken activist said he would use examples from his most recent book 'Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth' when speaking with faculty and staff at the Bermuda College tonight.

"I believed the book and ethics would be a more appropriate subject. There are a number of canons that lawyers deal with but it's not just the simple 'don't steal from your client-type' issues. There is so much pressure that lawyers have to deal with. Layer after layer of issues and decisions that business people in general have to make about money and the character and focus on money with all kinds of temptations," said Professor Bell, who also spoke to members of the Bermuda Bar Association last night.

After working for five years as the dean at the University of Oregon Law School, Professor Bell made his first individual protest against a university while working in Oregon. He resigned from the post in 1985 when faculty at the law school directed him not to hire an Asian-American woman.

Throughout his life, Professor Bell has dealt with many ethical issues in his own career and led one-man protests, but he said his position as a law professor has not been compromised by his path of protest.

"When I started working for the universities I think they believed I would be someone who would be quiet and not make waves, but I've always been one to raise issues."

In 1971, Professor Bell was the first black tenured faculty member at Harvard Law School. Ten years later he began working in Oregon and he returned to Harvard in 1986 where he led his second protest.

"When I made my protest at Harvard there wasn't a sense of getting things done. One individual can make a stand and it can lead to some reform but a group is always more powerful. But people in power will respond to unfairness only when it is in their best interest," Professor Bell said.

Even though he travelled to Bermuda this weekend, he said he was actually working on the manuscript for his new book tentatively titled 'Silent Covenants', which will focus on the landmark, US Supreme Court case that ruled on the integration of American schools.

"Next year is the 50th anniversary of the integration court case Brown v. Board of Education and I know there is going to be a good amount of work out next year, but I'm taking the angle that even though the Brown case was a more positive covenant it would not have happened if the US hadn't been worried about their racist reputation. It ended up helping the country with its domestic and foreign policies."

In Professor Bell's early work like 'Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism,' he used fiction to incorporate his ideas about race relations.

"My expertise is in race relations and my ideas differ from the norm so I use stories because people like stories and relate to them better. People will divorce the story from the author's point-of-view more than with a lecture or rhetoric.

"For people who have been victims of discrimination, stories provide a legitimisation of what they have experienced and for people who haven't the stories will provide more access for all readers."