[3]: 9–10 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 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.

"[6] 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.

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.

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.

"[8] 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.

He photographed events for the Boy and Girl Scouts, the black YMCA and YWCA, and the African American Junior League.

[12] The list of the famous includes Joe Lewis, Duke Ellington, Hattie McDaniel, Ella Fitzgerald, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt.

McNeill was a direct beneficiary of Wright's policy of giving out assignments to whoever was available at any given time, which gave all of the photographers equal opportunity in the department.

[15] In 1998 he received the Maurice Sorrell Lifetime Achievement Award from the EXPOSURE GROUP, African American Photographers Association.

His work was presented in 1983 and 1984 in A Century of Black Photographers,[17] a national traveling exhibit sponsored by the Rhode Island Institute of Design.

[19] In 1996, a large body of his work was featured in Visual Journal, a major exhibition of the Smithsonian's Center for African American History and Culture.