Tubbs’ husband, Michael, has been in politics for nearly a decade, most recently as the mayor of Stockton, California. “But, as I was writing, I was like it’ll be really funny if this is a boy.” It was. “We didn’t know the sex at the time, we left it a surprise,” she said in an interview. Tubbs became a mother herself in the process of writing and researching this book. “These men became symbols of resistance by following their mothers’ leads,” Tubbs writes. Berdis Baldwin acted as a buffer between her husband’s rage, and continued to instill the importance of education and freedom into her children. She married an abusive man who was diagnosed with mental illness near the end of his life.

He later said he had to block out the thought of her, feeling helpless and missing her wisdom.īerdis Baldwin was a single mother when she had James Baldwin - her first of nine children. Malcolm X was only reunited with his mother in the year before he was assassinated. After the death of Little’s husband, the single, landowning woman was in a Michigan state mental hospital for 25 years under dubious circumstances, scattering her children into foster care. Louise Little, an immigrant from the island of Grenada, was a leader in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Alberta, who lived in constant worry for her son’s safety, was assassinated in 1974, six years after her son, in a shooting at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church - the church her family built. Although Tubbs highlights how these women instilled the lessons their sons ultimately shared with the world, she also illustrates that their lives did not begin when they gave birth.īy law, Alberta King had to give up her career as a public school teacher when she got married but she continued to teach through the church and her role as a mother. The mothers’ lives span from the 1890s to the late 1990s, through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the deaths - in two cases, assassinations - of their sons. Tubbs, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge, encompasses the lives of Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin.

Anna Malaika Tubbs’ biography, “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” honors the women who reared some of the most famous men in history, but were subsequently all but erased from their legacies.

This story was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.īefore the world came to know three revolutionary men, they were sons whose mothers’ deep, honest love prepared each for lives of activism.

The three mothers tubbs