•May 2, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Of the Rockford Register Star

Victory Bell can still remember the night when he boarded the Illinois Central Railroad’s City of New Orleans in Durant, Mississippi, bound for Chicago, then changing trains and ending up in Rockford.

It was 1945, at the height of the Jim Crow apartheid in Dixie that purposely kept blacks poor with few rights. Bell, his mother and siblings were headed north to join his father, who had already moved north to get a factory job.

“We had been sharecroppers,” the 83-year old Bell remembers working near Durant, 60 miles north of Jackson. The family had eked out a living, but opportunities for advancement just were not there for black folks.

“I remember it was in the middle of the night when we boarded the train. We had to sit in the black section. When we got to Illinois, the conductor said we could sit anywhere we liked on the train,” Bell said, “and we no longer had to say ‘sir ‘or ‘ma’am’ to white people, which was new to us.”

His uncle and father had come to Rockford in 1943 and 1944 to get jobs that paid better than sharecropping.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.