Sister: An African American Life in Search of Justice
This oral history brings us into the presence of an extraordinary individual. Rarely does such a voice receive a hearing. 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. 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. Sylvia was the driving force behind their quest for justice.
Jody LePage
Jody LePage met Sylvia Bell White in 1973 when both were selling vegetables at a farmers' market in Madison, Wisconsin. She is an independent historian with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives and works in the Madison area.