Raised with twelve brothers in a part of the segregated South that
provided no school for African American children through the 1940s,
Sylvia Bell White went North as a teenager, dreaming of a nursing career
and a freedom defined in part by wartime rhetoric about American ideals.
In Milwaukee she and her brothers persevered through racial rebuffs and
discrimination to find work. Barred by both her gender and color from
employment in the city's factories, Sylvia scrubbed floors, worked as a
nurse's aide, and took adult education courses. When a Milwaukee police
officer killed her younger brother Daniel Bell in 1958, the Bell family
suspected a racial murder but could do nothing to prove it--until twenty
years later, when one of the two officers involved in the incident
unexpectedly came forward. Daniel's siblings filed a civil rights
lawsuit against the city and ultimately won that four-year legal battle.
Sylvia was the driving force behind their quest for justice. Telling her
whole life story in these pages, Sylvia emerges as a buoyant spirit, a
sparkling narrator, and, above all, a powerful witness to racial
injustice. Jody LePage's chapter introductions frame the narrative in a
historical span that reaches from Sylvia's own enslaved grandparents to
the nation's first African American president. Giving depth to that wide
sweep, this oral history brings us into the presence of an extraordinary
individual. Rarely does such a voice receive a hearing.
Winner, Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit
