15 Aug / The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs [in Booklist]
Sociology scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs double debuts as author and narrator in her empowering examination of three mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little, who “have been almost entirely ignored throughout history,” although their sons are renowned: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. What began as her Cambridge doctoral thesis on Black motherhood gained urgency when Tubbs herself became a Black mother. Her youthful, determined voice here belies her accomplishments, interwoven into this illuminating three-pronged biography encompassing a tumultuous century from the 1890s to the 1990s.
Alberta, Berdis, and Louise were born within six years of one another, their sons within five, and two of their three sons assassinated three years apart. Alberta was a reverend’s only daughter with a Spelman degree; Berdis migrated from a Chesapeake Bay island to Harlem, where she was a single mother to James until she married an abusive, mentally ill Baptist preacher; and Grenada-born Louise immigrated to Montreal, became a (Marcus) Garveyite and married a peripatetic activist.
Tubbs reclaims their lives, demands historical recognition, and revels in their greatest lesson: “each of us carries the potential to transform the world.”
Review: “Media,” Booklist Online, July 30, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021