A Path All His Own

Often Motley made a beeline to the downtown Montgomery Public Library after school. He was sitting there one day, an 11th-grader, and noticed a very frail man being wheeled in a wheelchair. The man was placed at a table near Eric. "Everybody in the library knew who he was," Motley says of George Wallace.

Eric said not a word to the old man.

"Here was a man at the end of his life sitting across from me. He represented the old Alabama. I represented the future."

In his senior year, Motley was accepted to Samford University, a highly regarded and conservative Baptist school in Birmingham. An aunt had wanted him to go to Alabama State, a historically black school -- "so you won't forget where you come from," she told Motley.

The elder Motleys, however, gave Eric their blessing.

He had made the transition to independent thinker.

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A Lonely Position

In American politics and letters, the black conservative has long been a controversial figure.

At the turn of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington was the most influential black man in the nation. An ex-slave who founded Alabama's Tuskegee Institute and pushed the idea of self-reliance, Washington took on the role of racial conciliator. "In all things that are purely social, " he said in a famous 1895 speech, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Washington became a major distributor of GOP patronage in the South and dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt. But in time, his popularity slid as a chorus of critics questioned his accommodation of inequality and his emphasis of economic improvement over political power. W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, pointed many an angry word at Washington, believing his philosophy angled toward keeping blacks in rural jobs and their aim low.

Even the most cherished entertainers have discovered that being on the other side of the political divide can get you branded a race traitor. Lionel Hampton, Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown, among others, all heard catcalls because of their support for conservative Republican administrations. Davis's 1972 endorsement of President Richard M. Nixon, whom many blacks considered anathema, triggered threats on the entertainer's life. In the generations since Booker T. Washington's prominence, many black Republicans have encountered similar distrust. In 1955, when E. Frederick Morrow became the first black man in history to work in an administrative position at the White House, he was viewed as an oddity. A Bowdoin College graduate, Morrow was appointed administrative officer for special projects in the Eisenhower White House. (Mostly, he gave advice on civil rights matters, including the Montgomery bus boycott.) Morrow's historic position didn't stop acquaintances from snickering behind his back. After his White House years had ended, he confessed how lonely it had all been.

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