A Path All His Own

Alabama is the home of the "Scottsboro Boys" -- the black youths wrongly convicted of raping two young white women in the 1930s. It is the Alabama of segregationist governor George Wallace and the panoramic civil rights marches over in Selma. It is the Alabama of little black boys in desperate straits.

The journey of Eric Lamar Motley began Dec. 17, 1972, at a hospital over in Tuskegee.

Barbara Motley had given birth to her first child, a boy. She did not want to keep the newborn and fled the hospital. Adoption or foster care seemed a possibility. It was a haunting tableau: Barbara herself had been adopted by Mamie and George Motley, and now had thrown her own child into that unknown world.

Mamie Motley heard of the birth, and wouldn't hear of foster care or adoption. The next evening, she rushed from her home and pleaded with a local farmer to take her to Tuskegee, 50 miles away. Her husband didn't drive at night.

So George -- bus driver, sometime carpenter -- was at home when Mamie arrived with the newborn.

"He said, 'What we gonna do with this boy?' " remembers Mamie Motley. "I said, 'We gonna raise him, that's what we gonna do.' And we never had to go on welfare."

Mamie Motley did housework for others -- black families as well as white families. Neither she nor George had much formal education.

The Motleys certainly didn't have much in common with the black intellectual high-steppers of Madison Park. There was Solomon Seay Sr., the renowned activist and ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose downtown church was on Dexter Avenue. And Solomon Jr., his son, a lawyer and a King acquaintance. There was Hagalyn Wilson, among the first black female doctors in Montgomery. And Prince Ella Madison, a stylish schoolteacher who demanded that black children not fall behind in the classroom. When Eric Motley began falling behind in first grade, Madison and others pounced. They insisted that he repeat first grade, though he didn't want to. With tutoring from various black women in the community, Motley's grades soared. George and Mamie allowed Eric to stroll through the house reciting verse. He helped his grandfather farm, but mostly he wanted to get to the library.

The Motleys attended Union Chapel AME Zion Church. The red-brick building sits in the shade of tall oak trees. "George built it essentially by himself," says John Winston, a physician and church member.

After church services, Eric would straighten chairs. He'd walk the elderly to their cars. The other kids sometimes snickered. Friends his age played hide-and-seek, ran races up and down roads. Motley thought such games a waste of his time.

"My mother got sick," remembers Winston, the physician. "I'd ride by and see Eric's bicycle on the side of her house. I'd know Eric was looking in on her."

Motley says he never felt ostracized in Madison Park about being adopted. "People in the community would say, 'George Motley's your daddy, boy.' Blood didn't matter that much. People respected who cared for you."