Scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes.
Anna Malaika Tubbs tells three stories that are often overlooked but deeply important to civil rights history ... Tubbs also makes room for moments of discovery that help us better understand how each of these civil rights icons’ social activism and artistic endeavors were shaped by their mothers’ shining examples. For instance, Alberta King’s radical maternal tenderness set the groundwork for how her son would view himself as a 'mother' birthing a dream of racial equality ... As Tubbs explained in an interview for BookPage, there is a troubling binary between motherhood and intellectual labor, and her writing about three women whose sons’ lives were shaped by their mothers (and not vice versa) is an attempt to turn that binary on its head.
Tubbs does a masterful job of interweaving the facts of these women’s lives into the evolving social and political histories of civil rights, including accounts of the horrific injustices suffered by women of color. This book arose out of Tubbs’ doctoral dissertation on Black motherhood. Her passion to give voices to overlooked people of color is evident, and her storytelling is compelling. This important piece of scholarship and profoundly personal portrayal of African American women deserves a wide audience.
Tubbs excavates and honors [...] traditions via the mothers ... Tubbs’s portrait is an intimate narrative that aims to link not only Little, King and Baldwin, but all Black mothers, including herself (she gave birth to a son while researching and writing the book). This gives rise to an inclusive tone that can be alternately comforting and jarring: comforting when Tubbs writes of 'our' shared experience as mothers; jarring when the narrative suddenly shifts to the second-person 'you.' Still, the intersections she highlights are beautiful — and including more of them might have enriched the story even more ... There are any number of places where the reader yearns for more anecdotes, more description and, most of all, more of the mothers’ own voices ... Try as she might, not even another mother can salvage such monumental erasures.
