Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Bell's mother, a sharecropper, moved him and his two brothers to East Baltimore when he was one and a half years old.

[1] On June 17, 1960, the group of 12 students entered Hooper's Restaurant, formerly located at Charles and Fayette Streets in downtown Baltimore, where they were refused service and asked to leave.

[4] The case was then appealed to the U.S Supreme Court, where Bell was represented by Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg.

In Bell v. Maryland (1964), the Supreme Court, noting that in the period since the students' conviction the Maryland General Assembly passed public accommodation laws and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[5] refused to rule whether the state's trespassing laws could be used to exclude blacks from public accommodations.

It has been suggested that the Supreme Court refrained from reaching the merits of the case in consideration of the pending civil rights legislation, as had it done so, it would have eliminated the basis for passing the Act.

[5] Bell later attended and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Morgan State University in Baltimore in 1966 and while there became a brother in Alpha Phi Omega.