Gelatin silver print
Not on view
When McNeill received a tip that Fortune magazine was seeking photographs related to domestic workers, he sought out an area where day laborers gathered known as the “Bronx Slave Market.” The pictures ultimately appeared in Flash, a Washington, DC–based “weekly newspicture magazine” geared toward African American audiences. “It was the small things that struck me,” McNeill recalled. “The idea that this woman had come up from the South, maybe was staying with relatives in New York and needed to help pay the rent, and ended up doing what she had known in the South. Or the expression on the white woman’s face, after she offers to pay 15 cents [an hour] and [the other woman] says, ‘Uh-uh, 20 cents is my price.’ I guess the pictures were too strong for Fortune, though, because they were never used.”
2020
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Robert H. McNeill
American, 1917–2005 23 works onlineBorn into a secure middle-class household in a segregated Washington, DC, Robert H. McNeill absorbed the political and cultural life of the city and studied at Howard University.
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Great Migration
A historic mass movement of over six million African Americans between 1910 and 1970, as migrants sought to escape the racial violence and limited economic mobility in the Southern United States under Jim Crow laws.
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