Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Willard Motley

Willard Motley (July 14, 1909–March 14, 1965) alan M. Wald Willard Motley was in all likelihood the most prolific novelist associated with the concluding years of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Nonetheless, two features pivotal to a discernment of the intricacies his life and work remain nebulous in biographical and critical scholarship. One is Motley’s convoluted political connection to the city’s principal tradition of African American literary radicalism; only in his late thirties did Motley emerge as a committed leftist, and his fiction was largely concerned with European ethnic groups and, later, Mexicans. The second enigmatic peculiarity is the presence of a degree of biographical mystery; Motley was a gay man who did not identify himself as such, and, for sundry reasons, guarded and even dissimulated about his private life. More precisely, Motley was a determined young writer coming of age in what is commonly called “The Red Decade,” yet he had no link to Black literary networks such as the South Side Writers Group, nor is there any evidence of his association with the traditional political causes of the Great Depression during the 1930s. Moreover, despite the traces of Marxist thought and a fidelity to the left-wing protest tradition of social realism in his novels, Motley’s African American fictional characters are customarily subsidiary and African American culture only superficially and even stereotypically represented. Motley was, furthermore, chronically hostile to suggestions of what he perceived to be militant Black nationalism, whether he detected it in the radical fiction of Chester Himes in his review of Himes’s Lonely Crusade in 1947,1 or James Baldwin’s attitude toward white liberals which he protested in a letter to Time magazine in 1963.2 Confounding his identification with the Chicago Renaissance , Motley relocated permanently to Mexico in 1951, a few years after the issuance of his first novel, publishing three quarters of his oeuvre from exile. Nonetheless, an examination of Motley’s life and writings, enhanced by new research and extended contextualization, renders an emended appraisal that roots him more securely in the Chicago Black radical tradition. Notwithstanding the thematic focus of his published fiction, Motley was unquestionably Willard Motley • 251 immersed in African American culture due to family and social connections. Starting in his teenage years, he wrote for the African American newspaper Chicago Defender, and in 1940 issued an influential essay on “Negro Art in Chicago” in the National Urban League’s journal Opportunity.3 Moreover, in the early 1940s, Motley developed friendships with left-wing Euro-American writers residing in Hull House, the social work settlement founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr, as well as with radicals on the Federal Writers’ Project. Then, in the late 1940s, Motley emerged as a crusading revolutionary, variously associating himself with a range of Communist and Trotskyist causes. Despite the expatriatism of his last fifteen years, Motley’s second and third novels, as well as volumes of unpublished fiction, were set in the city of Chicago, and he maintained personal contacts with emerging Chicago writers such as Frank London Brown. Unquestionably a consequential source for many themes and strategies of Motley’s novels, his personal life is marked by exceptional features that have been misunderstood or unrecognized by critics and scholars; the result has been a channeling of his accomplishment into the more limited categories of sociological, documentary, and “raceless” writing.4 Most notably, Motley was actively complicit in promoting false information about the Motley family history , much of which was repeated in newspaper items, and then in scholarship and reference books up until the late twentieth century. An illustration of this appears in the 1955 autobiographical entry that Motley supplied to Stanley Kunitz for the first supplement of Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary.5 Here Motley gave his birthdate as 1912 and stated that the painter, Archibald Motley Jr., was his older brother. Moreover, Knock on Any Door was dedicated “To Mary, My Mother,” and Let No Man Write My Epitaph “To Sergio, My Son.” In fact, Motley was born three years prior to 1912, Mary was not his mother, the painter Motley was not his brother, and there is no evidence of any biological children or legal adoptions. My own research indicates that Motley was born Willard Francis Bryant in 1909.6 His mother was Florence “Flossie” Motley, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Archibald John Motley, a Pullman porter who worked on the New York– Chicago “Wolverine” train, and Mary (“Mae”) Frederica...