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January 6, 2020

By Tonia Hill

Carl Neal lives in a two-story Chicago row house that was built in the 1900s in the South Side neighborhood of Grand Crossing. It’s a single-family home with a brown brick exterior and a front porch just big enough for a seat swing, perfect for catching a breeze from the lake on those humid summer nights in Chicago. 

I met with Neal for the first time on a rainy and cool day two years ago August. The 66-year-old greeted me with a warm smile; he has deep brown skin and still-youthful eyes. In his home, which was once his late mother’s, we are surrounded by her books and other miscellaneous items accumulated over years. Neal says he’s now in the process of renovating the home. 

Now Neal owns three pieces of property and is in the process of acquiring two more.

When I ask him about his childhood, and he remembers with ease. Neal says he always wanted to embrace his artistic side, but his grandfather showed him the importance of finding financial stability. In fact, Carl Neal’s journey from being the son of sharecroppers in Louisiana to a homeowner in Chicago illustrates the institutional forces that have created the racial wealth gap in America—and how he has battled those forces to build a brighter future for his daughters. 

***

Carl Neal was born in 1953 to Leola Neal and Henry Hudson in the small town of Waterproof in east Louisiana. Neal recollects that the town gained its name from the dry riverbeds where riverboats would pick up passengers and wood. His parents split when he was young, so he did not get to know his father. In his early childhood, he was raised by his maternal grandparents in Waterproof while his mother worked in Chicago and sent money back to the family. 

His grandparents were sharecroppers—the victims of an exploitative practice that was widespread in southern states following the Civil War. With slavery outlawed, white landowners would instead lease small parcels of farmland to Black families, taking a huge share of the resulting crop yield. Some would charge for rent and farming tools, putting the Black families in debt and effectively locking them into poverty. “It was subsistence living with a payday loan,” Neal says.

As a little boy, Neal picked cotton alongside his grandmother and grandfather. After spending hours in the hot and moist air, Neal would look forward to resting under the weeping willow tree at the end of their cotton field. It was the perfect spot for shade and to have a cool drink. 

“My grandfather made a deal with white landowners to farm the area and of course they would get a share of it and he would get whatever was left,” Neal says of his grandfather. “A lot of the time it was really strained. I believe that’s the reason why my mother and her siblings left. It was no profit in it. It was modern-day slavery. Your whole life was based on how well or how big of a profit you could bring in.”

Sometimes family members in Chicago would travel back down to Louisiana to help his grandfather pick cotton during harvest season. 

Neal’s grandfather as a boy had dreams of becoming a pitcher and playing in the Negro Baseball League. He grew up in the shadow of his uncle, a Negro League Player. He traveled alongside him in Louisiana and Mississippi during the league’s season. “When he got older that was one of his favorite memories. He loved baseball,” Neal says.

Though playing in the league seemed exciting, he knew that he’d have to lead a different life if he wanted a family. 

“Back then being a musician or an athlete [meant] hopping trains and catching rides. It was a tenuous type of existence at best,” says Neal. “When he decided to have a family, you can’t do that type of stuff. You have to grow up and become an adult. I guess that kind of morphed him into being a farmer.”

“My grandfather told me he hated [farming],” Neal says. “He used to laugh when people said you could make money out of it.”

***

At the turn of the 20th century, Black southerners began to leave the South and migrate north in search of new economic opportunities for their families and to escape the terror of Jim Crow. Known as the Great Migration, more than seven million Black people moved from the mid-1900s to the 1970s.

When Neal’s grandmother died, his mother Leola decided to bring him and his cousin to Chicago, where she lived with relatives in the Chatham neighborhood.

In the first wave of the Great Migration, 500,000 Black people settled in Chicago. Before that, Black people represented just two percent of the Chicago’s population. By 1970, the Black population increased to 33 percent. 

When Neal arrived in Chatham in the 1960s, it was about 64 percent Black and growing.

“Some of the people in the area seemed to be well off. They weren’t destitute,” Neal remembers. “It was a solid Black neighborhood that turned Black because the white people were moving out.”

It became an enclave for Black middle-class families, entrepreneurs and business owners.

“I didn’t realize that all these musicians were living around me, like the Staples Singers and the Five Stairsteps. They lived right down the street,” Neal says. “My aunt would take us over to the Regal Theater. We’d listen to these musicians and the next week we saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show.” 

But while Black folks were building communities and finding success on the South Side, they still faced obstacles that limited their ability to be on equal footing with their white counterparts. Discriminatory housing policies such as redlining and racially restrictive covenants kept Black families out of white neighborhoods and kept them in majority-Black areas, which quickly became plagued by overcrowding and poor living conditions. 

Those who did try to move faced discrimination and violence from their white neighbors who fought against integration.

Neal’s family moved from Chatham to South Shore, another Black neighborhood, and he eventually graduated from South Shore High School. He went on to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

After college, Neal spent time in Colorado, where he developed his interest in home renovation and teaching photography.

“I got a job with Holiday Inn doing repair work. They renovated rooms, [and] that’s where I got interested in fixing stuff,” Neal says. 

For most of his adult life Neal worked as a professional photographer and property owner. He chose commercial photography over gallery photography because he wanted to be able to sustain himself financially. As a commercial photographer, he took pictures of products to be featured in print publications—which became his main income. His “side hustle” was buying and managing property, he says. 

Owning property and building wealth through that was not something that he discussed with his mother or grandfather. 

“The only thing that I remember them saying… ‘You either pick cotton or you go to school. You’re either a laborer or management,” Neal says. “We lived in a house [in Louisiana]. We didn't live in an apartment. We were miles away from people and then of course everyone was living close together in the city. I guess I got indoctrinated to living in a house that encouraged me to move in that direction.” 

***

Neal purchased his first property in the 1980s, but it was not an easy process. He remembers it taking a year or two before he was approved for a mortgage for that first property in Greater Grand Crossing.

“The first one was the hardest because I was a novice to all of this—although, I learned who I could and could not approach for a mortgage,” he says. “My best option was my bank. When I approached others...they wouldn't even give me the time of day because of the location… It wasn’t until the 1990s that mortgages were more attainable for ethnic neighborhoods.”

Neal went to a commercial bank for a mortgage. In addition to savings, he also used money that he received from a settlement from an auto accident to use as a down payment. 

It was a common experience for Black Americans, especially in Chicago, where the process of “redlining” is said to have originated. Though the Federal Housing Administration was created in the 1930s to stabilize the real estate market and make homeownership more affordable after the Great Depression, its effects were limited to white, middle- to lower-class families. The FHA created maps of cities that rated most minority neighborhoods as “hazardous” investments, and people of color were barred from white-majority neighborhoods through racially restrictive covenants and outright violence.

Even after redlining was outlawed in 1968, lenders and banks have continued to disproportionately deny mortgages to Black applicants to this day, a major factor in the massive wealth gap between Black and white families in America.

“The mortgage companies wouldn’t give me a mortgage unless it had a high interest rate,” Neal remembers. 

Things started to change as federal laws were passed after the Civil Rights Movement, outlawing racial discrimination in the housing industry and reshaping the FHA to benefit minority homeowners. Black homeownership increased significantly in the ‘90s; in 1993, Black and Hispanic borrowers accounted for 22.2 percent of FHA loans, a rate that jumped to 33.9 percent in 1999, according to HUD.

Neal now either owns or is in the process of acquiring five pieces of property: family land in Louisiana, three residential buildings in Chicago and a vacant lot, the latter of which he acquired through the city’s dollar lots program.

“For me it was a matter of me wanting to acquire these things so later on I would not have the regret of not making this available for my children. I wanted them to have a choice. It’s not so much that I wanted them to have the property,” Neal says.  

After years of increases, Black homeownership numbers dwindled in the mid-2000s and plummeted during the 2008 recession. Research shows how the subprime mortgage crisis had a more significant and lasting impact on Black communities than white homeowners. Nationally, the homeownership rate for Black people between the ages of 35 and 44 dropped from 44 percent in 1990 to 33 percent in 2015. 

Geoff Smith, executive director at the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University ties housing equity to wealth loss differences between white and Black households in Chicago. 

At the height of the foreclosure crisis (2005-2015), Smith says, “Foreclosure activity was much more concentrated in African American communities [in Chicago]. Washington Park, Englewood, West Garfield Park and Chicago Lawn are largely African American and were definitely hit harder.”

According to researchers at the Urban Institute, 35 percent of Black residents in Chicago are homeowners while 74 percent of white residents in Chicago are homeowners. A 2017 report from the Federal Reserve found that the median wealth of white households, in 2016, was ten times that of Black households. In Chicago, there are twice as many Black families as white families with wealth, according to a January 2017 study by Prosperity Now.

Mass incarceration, slavery, redlining, racial discrimination and other policies have contributed to the gap in wealth between white and Black people in America. In spite of those deep-seated issues, Neal has managed to establish wealth through acquiring property that he will pass along to his youngest daughter, Caray, who will take up the reins when he’s no longer here. (His older daughter lives in California and shows little interest in managing property.)

Caray will become the fifth-generation owner of the land that Neal’s great-grandaunt once occupied in Louisiana, and the third-generation owner of Neal’s mother’s property in Grand Crossing. Leola, who moved the family from the South to Chicago, passed away in July 2016. Through the properties, Neal hopes he’ll ensure a more stable financial future for his children. 

When asked about his definition of wealth, Neal says it’s about more than money—it’s about the freedom to choose how to earn and keep it. 

“My definition would be the ability to choose. Even with a lot of money, you may be a poor person because you’re basically owned by that money,” he says. “Choose to do whatever you want to do as far as having some plan you’re able to commit to or some creative event that you want to initiate.”

The idea of choice and freedom was something Neal expressed over and over again in speaking about his grandfather, who dreamt of being a professional athlete but realized it was more practical to be a farmer and a family man. Or his mother, whose biggest regret was not earning a college degree. 

 “She wanted to go to college but couldn’t. They had a bad crop that year. It was one of her deepest regrets,” Neal says.

The story of Carl Neal is common among the descendants of Black migrants who left all they knew in the South and traveled north for a better life and access to the “American Dream.” Carl Neal and his daughters are the embodiment of the hopes and dreams of their ancestors.

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