Willard Motley: 'My Race Is the Human Race'

Willard Motley had one of the strangest and most compelling careers in African American literature. He wrote his way from Chicago into national acclaim, and the path ran straight through the country's racial and social fault lines — the American Dream with its costs left in.

Born in Chicago in 1909, Motley grew up inside a family secret: he was raised to believe his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his sister. That was the first of many ways his life in a middle-class African American family refused to follow the expected script.

He started young. At 13 he was writing for the Chicago Defender under the pseudonym "Bud Billiken." Later he moved through state after state and job after job, collecting the experiences that would fill his books.

His debut novel, "Knock on Any Door," published in 1947, made him famous. Its protagonist, Nick Romano, is an Italian-American boy pulled into crime — a story told in the naturalist tradition, tracking how poverty grinds toward despair and how the immigrant experience feeds that cycle.

A Black novelist centering white characters was a controversial choice, and Motley knew it. He refused the assignment the literary world had waiting for him — that an African American writer must write about race and nothing else. "My race is the human race," he declared, and he meant it as a working principle, not a slogan.

The later novels — "We Fished All Night" and "Let No Man Write My Epitaph" — kept working the same social ground, to a more mixed critical reception. In 1952 he moved to Mexico, where he found some peace and kept writing until his death in 1965.

His name still moves through Chicago. The Bud Billiken Picnic and Parade — the most prominent African American parade in the United States — carries his old pen name down the street every year. And in 2014, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inducted him, a late nod to what he gave American literature.

Motley refused every box offered to him: the racial one, the biographical one, the one critics kept building around his books. What he wrote insists that the struggles in his pages belong to everyone. Read him now and the insistence still lands.