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cc >> Today, we are pleased to introduce Jody LaPage, co-author of the book "Sister: An African-American Life in Search of Justice," as part of Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters, and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society's or the museum's employees. The book, "Sister" follows the true story of Sylvia Bell White, a woman whose brother racially charged murder by a Milwaukee Policeman in 1958, led to a decade-long fight for justice. In telling Sylvia's story, she -- as a buoyant spirit and powerful witness to racial injustice. Please join me today in welcoming Jody LaPage to the stage.

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>> Thank you. First, I want to say that I wish my co-author, Sylvia Bell White, could be presenting with me today. You will hear her voice, however, in clips from the audio tapes we made, as we began this project back in 1998. And you'll see photos from various times in her life. This cover photo shows Sylvia as she looked around the time the book begins. That is where I will begin, as well. On the evening of February 2, 1958, Sylvia Bell White and her friend, Stella, were driving down Center Street in Milwaukee. The two women had gone to pick up the cake pans, punch bowl and cups that Sylvia had left at her brother Dan's birthday party the night before. Now they were hurrying back to Sylvia's house, so she could get ready for her night shift at a nursing home. As they neared Sixth Street, flashing police lights caught Sylvia's eye. "That looks like Dan's car down there," she said without stopping. Half a block down Sixth Street, Daniel Bell lay dead in the snow, gunned down by a police officer after being pulled over for a burnt-out taillight. The shooter had immediately recognized that he could not justify the killing. He and the officer with him devised a cover-up story, and he planted a knife on Dan's body. Back at the police department, their superiors helped the two officers embellish their story and gave it to the media without notifying the family. Sylvia was getting dressed for work when her seven-year-old son cried out that Dan had been killed. Stunned, she tried to make sense of the TV news story. One detail rang false. The police said that Dan had lunged at them with a knife in his right hand. Anyone close to Dan knew that he was left-handed. Twelve days later, an all-white inquest jury declared the killing "justifiable homicide." Inquest procedure did not permit the Bell family's attorney even to mention that Daniel was left-handed. This is Dan in a photo taken just days before his death, 22 years old, wearing a hat he had just bought. From the start, the Bell family did not believe what the police said about the killing. In 1960, they filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Milwaukee. But that first attempt to obtain justice only brought greater sorrow. The law did not allow siblings to sue if a parent was still alive. So their father, a Louisiana truck farmer and sawmill worker, who could neither read nor write, had to bring the lawsuit. Dock Bell was in his late 60s by then and had never been out of the South. In Milwaukee, he faced the city's attorneys on the witness stand and could not answer their questions. He collapsed in court and never regained his health. Daniel Bell's father died a broken man, crushed by what seemed a cruel irony. He had raised his 13 children in a Deep South state notorious for racial violence. Yet Dan had been killed up north, where this father had sent his children as if to the Promised Land. Just before dying, Dock Bell predicted that what really happened to Dan that night would one day come to light. In an extremely unusual turn of events, it did. Twenty years after Dan's death, one of the two officers involved, Louis Krause, went to the Milwaukee District Attorney and described the wrongful killing of Daniel Bell, the racial slurs uttered by the shooter the coverup story, and the planting of the knife. The DA would not reopen the case until the shooter Thomas Grady had confirmed nearly all of Krause's assertions on a wiretapped phone. When Grady was arrested a year later, he pled guilty to homicide by reckless conduct and perjury. He admitted that he had planted the knife on Daniel Bell. Much had changed in the intervening years. Now Daniel Bell's family filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Milwaukee. And their attorneys found a more important witness. Russell Vorpagel had been the first detective to arrive on the scene of the killing that night in 1958. He had been disturbed by the handling of that case; disturbed by the outright falsification and by the racism. So disturbed that he left the Milwaukee police and had a very successful career with the FBI. Now he returned, eager to testify about a case that had bothered him for 20 years. Vorpagel's testimony implicated not only his immediate superiors, but also the Chief of Police and the District Attorney at the time of the killing. More important, he exposed the negative racial attitudes pervasive within in the police department. Ultimately, the Bell family won their lawsuit. First, they won a jury verdict in December 1981. This photo from the Milwaukee Sentinel shows Sylvia and her brother Patrick Bell leaving the courthouse the day of that verdict. When the city refused to accept the verdict and appealed, the Bells and their attorneys pressed on. In September 1984, the jury's earlier decision was upheld by the Appeals Court. The family won what Sylvia felt as justice, but only after an ugly four-year battle in law offices, the courtroom, and the media. This Milwaukee Sentinel photo of the last meeting, the final document review, says much about the whole process, the long table with its stacks of files and legal documents; the lawyer's hands and suit cuffs; the TV microphones; Sylvia's and Patrick's facial expressions. Before this meeting, the mayor had announced that he would not sign the final agreement. Against the odds, the Bell family prevailed. Their case grew in importance over the years as it proved one of relatively few such victories. The Daniel Bell case remains important, above all, because it exposes grave abuses that African Americans continue to endure in a society that proclaims its commitments to equality before the law. Rarely does police testimony so unequivocally confirm that minorities have reasons to mistrust. That's why the Daniel Bell case re-enters public discussion in Milwaukee, with each new questionable incident. And Milwaukee is certainly not the only city, where such incidents continue to occur. The Daniel Bell case brings us here today, because Sylvia's involvement, her active role in pursuit of justice for her brother, kindled her desire to tell her whole life story, a story with a much wider scope, and equally important, the kind of story that history seldom has the chance to record. This is the Sylvia that so many people have known and loved. This photo was taken in 1999, at the farmers' market in Milwaukee, where Sylvia sold produce for decades. The same market where she asked me to help write her story in 1987. That story takes us from the swampy pine woods of Louisiana to Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and back to rural Wisconsin. Sylvia's autobiography winds through major events in American History, as it spans from her own grandparents born in slavery through the election of the nation's first African-American president. Born in 1930, Sylvia grew up through the Great Depression and the New Deal era. In her early teens, she had four brothers fighting in World War II. After the war, she joined millions of African Americans who left the segregated South in the second wave of the Great Migration. She witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Power Movement, and the decades of backlash against those movements. This brings me to the main point, the main point Sylvia wanted to make with this book. That for all the change she's seen in her lifetime, racial injustice remains a major problem today. Raised where African Americans were barred from voting, Sylvia later cast her vote many times, including for an African-American president. She has also lived to see the Supreme Court weaken the Voting Rights Act, and states passing laws that effectively curb African-American voting. And that is just one of many possible illustrations of Sylvia's main point. To historians, it's also of real significance that Sylvia speaks from a social position shared by most African Americans of her generation, but greatly under-represented in the historical record. It was during Sylvia's lifetime, in the World War II era, that historians widely came to recognize what is now pretty much taken for granted now, that history paints an inaccurate picture of the past, if it focuses only on the few at the top of social hierarchies, the kings and aristocrats, the ruling classes, the big names and their roles in major events. Once historians recognized the need to record the lives and experiences of ordinary people, they then faced the problem of actually learning about those lives. Because, throughout history, so many people have had limited access to education and the means of having their voices heard. People such as Sylvia. Sylvia lived her childhood in a part of the South where schooling was provided for whites only, where black children would not have had any school at all if their parents hadn't done what they could to create one, obtaining a room in the church, hiring a teacher, one teacher for as many as 100 students and then only for a few months of the year. Arriving in Milwaukee at age 17, Sylvia was truly shocked to learn that the South was not the only part of her country where she would not be treated fairly because of the color of her skin. She talks about her first encounter with Northern job discrimination in this audio clip about Jaeger's bakery, a bread-baking factory on the same street where Sylvia was staying at her aunt's. >> I could see all the beautiful trees, the nice, big old trees in front of her house. And it was cold. It was very cold. I could see all the people. I don't want to really emphasize only white, but all these white people would be walking down there, the streets on Monday morning. There's be just throngs of them. I'd say, where are they going, and she'd say, they are going to this bakery. Right up under us. It was a nice little black community in there. I would say, oh, my God, look at those people. Then she'd go, they're going to work. They're going to work? Maybe I can get me a job over there. She'd say, not hardly. White people have been walking down that street for many, many years. And they go right up under us, and they do not hire black. So I would go over there, and I would ask, because one black boy with all that flour, you know, he had to help put that flour down in the basement, or whatever it was. That was the only person that I saw, right up under me. He'd, "I'm at work now." I was almost ready to about face and go back then. I'm up north and couldn't even work at Jaeger's Bakery? >> Sylvia did not "about face" and go back South, as she felt like doing in that moment. Instead, she juggled multiple

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washing dishes, scrubbing floors, working as a nurse's aide; while taking adult education courses and dreaming of that nursing career she would never have. Later, she managed to buy a house after marrying Milwaukee's first black DJ, O.C. White, who was also a full-time construction worker then. Sylvia spent the last decades of her working life as you see her here, a truck farmer and vendor at farmers' markets. Certainly not occupations commonly associated with having your say. In a sense, Sylvia is representative of many other African Americans who grew up in the segregated south migrated north and faced similar situations. She experienced the Civil Rights movement, not as a direct participant, but as most people did, by word of mouth, on the radio, on TV and through pop culture. Black Power reached Sylvia through pop music, through sports stars such as Muhammad Ali, through fashion trends, and slogans. I'm Black and I'm Proud. Black is Beautiful. When I first met Sylvia in 1973, that strong sense of empowerment enhanced the beauty of her face. If Sylvia is in some ways representative of ordinary people, she is also very far from ordinary. This begins with the remarkable man who had to be both mother and father to Sylvia and her brothers through much of her childhood. Dock Bell. It was not all that unusual for workers in Louisiana's lumber industry to buy cut over land from their employers, as this man did. It was more exceptional, however, that Dock Bell made such a success of it, that he managed to clear the stumps and roots from that five acres of logged pine woods, that he restored and farmed that land to feed his family relatively well during the hungry years of the Depression. Sylvia proudly recalls the esteem of the community that named a road after her father. Most important, Dock Bell showed his children how to maintain dignity in the degrading and oppressive atmosphere of the segregated South. A few times, he resisted the wrongs directly. When a group of young white men made trouble at the nearby juke joint, for example, Dock Bell kicked them out, undeterred by threats of mob retaliation. In that environment, Dock Bell showed his children that you demonstrate dignity by holding to your own understanding of what is right and wrong, rather than letting the behavior of others drive your conduct. This father is a powerful presence throughout Sylvia's narrative. Here she is in 1998 holding his portrait. Sylvia herself is a quite the extraordinary individual. How many of us could recount a family legend such as this one where she lifts a full-sized tractor that had tipped over onto her brother Eddie? >> I was in my kitchen, and I lived like, oh, I would say -- from Eddie, or a quarter of a mile. I heard Eddie's tractor, and all at once the tractor was going, and all at once it was going "puhp-puhp-puhp." And when it went out, I heard somebody say, "Help!" "Help me!" And I said, oh, God. I just dropped everything and I ran out of the house. I saw the tractor was turned over on his leg. I could see him from where I was going up the hill. I ran up that hill and I walked up to that, I says, "Eddie!" He says I gotta call somebody. I was starting up to his house, you know, to call on the phone. I said I've gotta call the rescue squad. I've got to call the rescue squad. He says, "I can't wait. I can't wait." I looked at him and I says, then I looked at the tractor and it's all steel. It was a rubber tire on this big hunk of steel. I looked at that tractor, and I just looked up and I said, "God, give me strength." And I picked up that thing. I don't remember picking it up, but I picked the wheel up. My brother told me, he had crawled over, he told me, he just told me, he said, I had crawled a distance, and he said, "Put it down, sis! Put the tractor down!" >> Sylvia is outstanding, too, for her drive, her daring, for always pushing the limits imposed by racism. This is Sylvia standing next to the house she bought in an all-white Milwaukee neighborhood in the 1950s. Hers was the only black family on that street for years. So Sylvia could observe a change in police behavior there. As the neighborhood became more black, residents began to get tickets for parking on the street. As Sylvia suspected, this was no coincidence. In fact, when the Wisconsin Division of the US Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in 1972, a Milwaukee police officer who testified, admitted, that the Milwaukee police did indeed have a practice at that time of ticketing people for parking on the street in black neighborhoods but not in white neighborhoods. Outraged, Sylvia ignored the ticket she found on her car. In this clip, she describes what happened when a police officer came to her door to get her to pay or to arrest her. >> Well, I go to the Police Department, and I says, Mister, I do not have money to pay this ticket, and I have a child. What can I do now? Set in jail for the ticket? Because it was a couple days in jail, you know. Well, ma'am, you got to pay that ticket. You call up your friends or your family, or somebody, to help you pay that ticket. I says, well, my family don't have anything either. How can I call 'em to ask 'em to pay the ticket? Oh, we had such a round about that ticket. I said, I'll just go to jail for the ticket, and can I bring my little boy in here with me? Are you gonna take him to school? He goes to school right there on Chambers, not Chambers, Victor Berger right up the street there. I says, what are we gonna do? Because I do not have the money. I says, I only have a little change until I get paid, and that's about two weeks, or something like that. Girl, I raised so much sand in there with that officer that one, I get, well, I'm gonna take you back there and lock you up. I say, yeah, do that. Do somethin' so I can get that ticket over with, because if I stay in jail and you're gonna see about my child at home, because I have a child there, and he's in school. At first, this one policeman said to me, when he came back to knock on my door to tell me that I owed this ticket, he says, Miss White. I says, what. He says, you owe a ticket, and I'm here to arrest you or you pay this ticket. I say, well, I don't have any money. I'm living on --, and I says, I really don't have any money, so the only thing I can do is accept the arrest. You making a bad name for yourself. I says, well, if that's the only way I can pay the ticket. That's all I did. I didn't kill nobody. If I had murdered somebody, then I'd be making a bad name. But I'm not making a bad name for myself by going to jail for a ticket. You've got to be kidding me. How stupid can you get? So, him and I. He said, should I call the wagon? I said, no, you don't have to call the wagon. I'll walk down there. That's how close it was. I say, you can save the city that gas. I'll walk down there. Me and him, we're walking down there, all the way to the Police Department. 'Cause I was teed off. I say, we will walk. That give me a chance to talk to you while I'm walking down there. So, when he pushed the door open, me and and him was walking in. They say, you got doozy there. I say, I'm no doozy, I'm Sylvia White, and this man picked me up. He come to my house to arrest me for this ticket, and I do not have the money, so that's when me and this officer. They all white. There were no black officers then. They were all white there. I says, I do not have any money. I have a child to support, and he is at school. He'll be at home, and he would've been home pretty soon. Oh, I started. Oh, did I start in that place, about, I says, the minute black people move in, then you start giving tickets. I've been living here for so many years, and nobody got a ticket for parking on that street. Now I have a black neighbor, and then I have another neighbor, black, across the street over this direction, and now the minute black people moving in the neighborhood, this is what you do! I says, I don't have the money. I'll sit in jail. I said, what I need to do is call the NAACP, or somebody here to bail me out. I said, but I'll call my brother and see if he can bail me out. I said, but I'll sit, because I don't have no money. Well, call your brother. I said, my brother ain't home. He's working, too. He's not home, and I just have to go to jail. That man heard me, sitting in the office. He's was sitting back there. He said, come here this way. I said, sure, you know. He said, give me the ticket. I said okay.

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He discarded, or he did something to it. Now, if I had ran down there and paid that ticket. That, see, still, what I shoulda done was went to somebody else, too, to say, could we stop some of this giving tickets in the neighborhood, when they'd never had a ticket in that neighborhood in so many years. So many years, they never gave a ticket in that neighborhood, 'cause I was there. >> This is Sylvia. This is the woman that I loved as perhaps the most fun person I had ever met, for almost a decade before I knew what had happened to her brother. Learning about that tragedy, I was more amazed than ever by Sylvia's extraordinary ability to love people and how easy it is to love her back. This image that appears on the back flap of the book's jacket captures something of that good-heartedness that I knew long before meeting the hard-headed sister of Daniel Bell. This is a scan from the cover of the Milwaukee Sentinel Entertainment Section when the Milwaukee Repertory Theater staged a play about the Daniel Bell case in January 1987. This one shows Sylvia and her son Douglas, the child that she was talking about in the tape, at the opening of the play, called "An American Journey." Sylvia played an important consulting role in both the writing and the production of that play, widening its scope beyond the Daniel Bell case to a larger picture of race in America. That experience had much to do with inspiring Sylvia to do this book. In 1988, she travelled with members of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater to Philadelphia to help another theater group there do the play. Here she is touching the Liberty Bell. I'll wrap it up now, with a few more images. This is the old Bell family homestead, the house that Dock Bell built with his own hands in Springfield, Louisiana. That's Sylvia wearing a bright pink blouse in the tall grass, with a hoe ready for snakes. She wouldn't even let me out of the car. After the lawsuit settlement, Sylvia put much of her portion into remodeling the old house and began spending winters there, until someone broke into the place while she was away in Wisconsin and started a fire. She was so upset that she didn't go back to Springfield until she took me there in 1998. The day I took this photo, she was seeing the house for the first time in ten years. As you can see, it had fallen into a sad state of disrepair. Here she is during that 1998 visit to Springfield, Louisiana, at Dan's grave. This one is from Sylvia's passport, which was made in 1980, when her son was in the military and stationed in England, took her to London and Paris. We didn't put this one in the book, mostly because it has the seal of the United States of America embossed across her face. I love that part of the picture, too, because of how important American ideals have been in Sylvia's mind and life. Strongly affected by having brothers serving in World War II Sylvia, like other African Americans of that generation, came out of the wartime experience with a very strong sense of identity as an American, that is, as an American citizen with rights. Mostly, I love this photo because there is so much in it of the Black-Powered Sylvia I first met. It's also close to how she looked when she lifted that tractor off of Eddie. This is Sylvia in the year 2000, with two of the attorneys who brought the civil rights lawsuit for the Bell family, Curry First on the left and Walt Kelly on the right. I snapped this picture when Sylvia and I attended the Wisconsin Bar Association convention for Walt Kelly's presentation of Daniel Bell case. This is Sylvia now. Here she is with Walt Kelly, that's his back, and her social worker, Lisa Goodrich, at the book release party in Madison this past June. Here she is with her son Douglas at that party. This one is from the party, too. Thank you for your attention.

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