Robert H. McNeill (December 19, 1917 – May 27, 2005) was an American photographer who documented African-American life. "In the 1930s and 40s, any time there was a political, social, religious or community event in Washington's black community, Robert H. McNeill was there to photograph it."
Early life and education
McNeill was born in Washington, D.C.: his father William C. McNeill was a physician and medical educator, and his mother Mary Alice (née Wheeler) McNeill was a DC school teacher and member of the Board of Education. He discovered his interest in photography as a high school student at Dunbar High School, where his aunt Bertha Clay McNeill taught. She gave him his first camera and encouraged his career.
Career
Education
As an 18-year-old sophomore at Washington's Howard University, McNeill photographed the 1936 Olympics hero Jesse Owens during his post-Olympics visit to the campus. He sold the photograph to the two local African-American newspapers and to all four of the daily "mainstream" DC newspapers, whose coverage of the African-American community had generally been very limited. That was a pivotal moment in his career. After attending Howard University for two years as a pre-medical student, he entered the New York Institute of Photography where he graduated in 1938.
New York
New York City was a fertile field for photographic subjects and an inspiration for McNeill. He photographed dancers at the Savoy Ballroom, cartoonist E. Simms Campbell and Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman (rehearsing for the famous Carnegie Hall Concert of 1938) among others.
While at the institute, McNeill learned that Fortune magazine was looking for photographs of the "domestic workers, mostly black, who assembled on designated street corners each day to sell their labor to the highest bidder."<ref>Natanson,Nicholas. "Robert H. McNeill and the Profusion of Virginia Experience", p. 100. In Visual Journal: Harlem and D.C. in the Thirties and Forties", Deborah Willis and Jane Lusaka, editors. 1996, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC</ref> McNeill was developing his own style of documentary photography as he juxtaposed images of the black workers with their surroundings; for example, three women and a man standing beneath a movie poster that reads, "Make a Wish". As part of the project, McNeill was able to follow Bessie Windstown as she stood waiting on a corner for a prospective job, through her negotiations with a white housewife from the Bronx for her hourly wage to the employer's home, where he was able to photograph her scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees. In the end, Fortune did not use McNeill's pictures; their final story, "The Servant Problem", portrayed the story from the employers’ viewpoint. McNeill was able to publish the essay "The Bronx Slave Market" in Flash!, a Washington and NYC-based, black-edited magazine. He returned to Washington in 1938 and established himself as a free-lance photographer.
Virginia
That same year, McNeill's work came to the attention of Sterling Brown, a faculty member at Howard University and the Negro Affairs editor for the Federal Writers' Project. Brown was launching what was to be known as the Negro in Virginia study. The project was unique in that it had "an all-black research staff led by Hampton Institute scientist Roscoe Lewis"; the mission was to document "three centuries of black history through sources as varied as ex-slave narratives, economic statistics, and photographs."
McNeill spent most of September 1938 traveling as an uncompensated consultant through the state of Virginia alone in a black coupe with USA license plates. With 160 images for his Speed Graphic camera and a few rolls of 35 mm for a borrowed Leica, the young photographer had to be very judicious about his shots. During those three weeks, he filmed workers at their jobs from the most menial to the black middle class. He encountered the tobacco workers, the longshoremen, and bankers.
Only a few of McNeill's epic photographs of black life in the state were eventually published in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion and that world invisible to most of America, The Negro in Virginia, in 1940.