She said she was born with politics running through her veins. She grew up in Gary, Indiana, surrounded by politically active people, including her mother, who worked in politics for over 35 years.
Bell recalled putting fliers on doors for the election of Richard Hatcher, Gary’s first African American mayor, when she was in kindergarten.
She came to Houston for her studies at the University of Houston for chemical engineering on a scholarship and never left. Having worked as a bank teller in Indiana, Bell walked up to the Texas Commerce Bank in downtown on 712 Main St., now a Chase Bank, and got a job as the branch’s second Black teller in the 1980s, she said.
Working at Texas Commerce, Bell met prominent Black members of the community who banked there, such as Moses LeRoy and Quentin Mease.
“It was like they adopted me,” she said.
Bell worked on her first political campaign in Houston when Sheila Jackson Lee, her fellow Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister, ran for an at-large council seat in 1989.
While nine months pregnant, Bell said she spoke to voters at the polls while standing on milk cartons Jackson Lee brought her for her swollen feet. Later, when Jackson Lee ran for her congressional seat, Bell helped again.
The genesis of Bell’s decadeslong work championing local struggles came through her civic club involvement in MacGregor, when the University of Texas sought to turn the Wright Morrow mansion on South MacGregor Way into an outpatient psychiatric hospital, she said.
“So we took a bus up to the University of Texas and took pictures of our children, ... and we asked, ‘If these were your kids, would you want that?’ And we killed that project,” Bell said.
Now, Bell said there are multimillion-dollar townhomes on that lot.
Bell is the president of MacGregor’s super neighborhood and served as an early president for Houston’s Super Neighborhood Alliance.
Nowadays, Bell speaks out at meetings regarding issues such as conservation districts and the concessions at William P. Hobby Airport.
Bell said she is inspired to keep going by youth activism.
“I want to make it better for ... future generations,” she said. “Because if it wasn’t for the people who lived in this neighborhood and preserved it for me to come, I wouldn’t be here.”
