Sharon Fountain reviews Stanley Hill’s powerful story of family and resilience
There are some structures in our communities that stand not simply as concrete and steel—but as witnesses. They see our laughter, our loss, our becoming. For Stanley Louis Hill, Sr., the EL Wall on Chicago’s South Side was such a structure: towering, constant, quiet, and inescapable. In his newly released memoir, “The EL Wall Has A Story to Tell,” Hill offers a stirring and poignant recollection of growing up beneath that imposing slab of elevated railway that once carved “short Vernon” into a cul-de-sac just east of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The book is both deeply personal and widely resonant, particularly for those who grew up in the Black enclaves of Bronzeville, Kenwood, or Grand Boulevard.
The EL Wall was never just infrastructure. It was an elevated train viaduct—built for industry and efficiency—yet it shaped the lives of families living in its long, looming shadow. Rising 20 feet high and nearly 40 feet wide, the concrete wall carried both CTA trains and freight traffic through the heart of a once-vibrant Black neighborhood. The tracks on top rumbled with the noise of cattle bound for the Union Stockyards and workers riding home from downtown. Below, however, life in the cul-de-sac unfolded with its own rhythm—one rooted in faith, family, and survival.
Hill’s narrative begins at 3975 South Vernon Avenue, where he was born in 1949 in a home that housed not just his immediate family but an entire village of relatives. These were the row houses—stacked three-flats built in the late 1800s—that lined the now-vanished street known locally as “short Vernon.” Like many Black families migrating from the South, Hill’s maternal grandmother, Cleo Bell Kelley, became the matriarch of a multi-generational, multi-unit household. Her resourcefulness—such as heating a garage with a potbelly stove to accommodate the overflow of cousins and foster children—is a testament to the strength and adaptability that define so many African American families.
But this is not just a story of one family. It is the story of a neighborhood. Hill captures the essence of life among the red-brick row houses that once stood in the shadow of the EL Wall. He remembers handball games against its base, chalk art and graffiti on its surface, and summer block parties filled with music, food, and kinship. “We freely collaborated together because of our geographic proximity to the EL Wall,” Hill writes. “Oblivious to the negativity or challenges that surely existed outside our immediate neighborhood.”
The wall served as both boundary and backdrop. Children played baseball in the alleys beside it, using its massive face as a backstop. Older kids walked atop it—dangerously close to the electrified CTA third rail—testing territorial limits and, sometimes, getting into trouble. Hill describes a childhood encounter when he crossed into another neighborhood’s turf and was seen as a threat. A bump on the forehead was the only physical injury, but the lesson was lasting. “The EL Wall,” he later wrote, “although I wasn’t thinking about it this way at the time, was an incredible part of my life.”
What makes Hill’s memoir especially powerful is how it gracefully blends the physical world of his childhood with the emotional and spiritual landscape of growing up Black in America. His description of a household enriched with creativity, storytelling, and strong adult role models is deeply stirring. In a dining room surrounded by paintings and symphonies from a player piano, Hill cultivated an imagination that would carry him far beyond the constraints of the cul-de-sac. “I naturally knew how to look at things,” he reflects, “but my imagination gave me an ability to see beyond the material world.”
That gift for seeing the unseen would follow him through life. Hill’s journey is filled with moments of resilience—his father, Johnnie, burned in an industrial accident, pacing nervously in the kitchen while Hill’s mother labored through childbirth upstairs. The financial anxiety. The determination to pivot. After leaving the foundry, his father opened a shoeshine stand in the nearby CTA station. There, amid the foot traffic and daily conversations, he earned the nickname “Rabbi” for the wisdom he offered customers. “Don’t let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash,” he liked to say—a homespun parable that stuck with his son.
Hill does not flinch from the complexity of family life, but neither does he dwell on trauma. His story is ultimately one of growth, not grievance. His mother, Lillie Louise Hill, worked for 45 years as secretary of Morning Star Baptist Church, now a Chicago Landmark. She instilled in him a work ethic, a spiritual foundation, and the belief that excellence was not optional—it was expected. “She ensured I got a healthy dose of church throughout my childhood and adolescent years,” he writes.
That foundation served him well. He went on to become senior class president at Wendell Phillips High School, located just one block north of the EL Wall. From there, he attended Northwestern University, earning his bachelor’s degree in journalism, and later received his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School. In 2010, when he was sworn in as a Cook County Circuit Court Judge, family and friends who had grown up with him on “short Vernon” came to celebrate. The memory of the wall was with them all.
The memoir intersects powerfully with key moments in Black American history. Hill attended preschool at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ—yes, that Roberts Temple—the site of Emmett Till’s 1955 funeral. The young Hill played with his classmates on the church grounds, unaware of the legacy that would come to define it. He revisits that memory with reverence, understanding that the very space where he learned to run and laugh was also sacred ground in the struggle for civil rights. The EL Wall stood over it all—quiet, towering, and still.
Hill’s prose is warm, intelligent, and reflective. At times, it reads like oral history, other times like poetry. He quotes Lou Rawls’ “Dead End Street” not just for color but as an emotional truth of the era. The EL Wall—like Rawls’ lyrics—is both literal and symbolic. It divided and connected. It restricted and protected. It cast a shadow and, somehow, reflected light.
There are passages in the book that will feel instantly familiar to Crusader readers: mentions of Lou Rawls living on East 40th Street, church mothers and church music, the scent of stove-heated garages, the sacredness of streetlights flickering on during summer nights. His description of block parties on “short Vernon,” where residents shared food and danced long into the night, feels like a love letter to a form of community that has grown rare—but not extinct.
The inclusion of a recent photo of a baby resting on a stack of classic Black literature—W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, bell hooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Nikki Giovanni, Zora Neale Hurston, and more—resonates with Hill’s own story. The image, which accompanied a recent email from Hill, is a visual echo of his life’s mission: to honor legacy, nurture brilliance, and remind us that we are shaped by the stories, struggles, and structures around us.
This book deserves a place on the shelf alongside Manchild in the Promised Land, The Warmth of Other Suns, and even The Souls of Black Folk. It is memoir as cultural preservation. It is testimony as architecture.
And for those of us who remember the EL Wall—not just as a place, but as a presence—this story will feel like going home.
Sharon Fountain is the managing editor of the Chicago and Gary Crusader Newspapers.