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The women have much in common: They were born within a few years of one another; they all married men trained in the church; their lives spanned the 20th century; all three outlived their sons. And yet they were very different from each other.
Louise Langdon Little, who became the mother of Malcolm X, was Caribbean and biracial. Born in 1897, “the exact details of her conception have been lost to history,” Tubbs notes, but it is believed that her mother was raped by a white man. Sadly, this was not uncommon, Tubbs reminds us: “The effects of slavery . the constant control of black women s bodies through sexual violence, was universal, far after emancipation.”
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Book World: The Three Mothers honors the women who made Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin
Lisa Page, The Washington Post
Feb. 12, 2021
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Motherhood is said to be its own reward. You learn to give of yourself, and this will stretch you, as a person. But you may also learn to put yourself in the background, which will shrink you - and even make you disappear.
History does this to us anyway, argues scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs. Black women in particular are largely erased from the American historical trajectory - marginalized, at best. Tubbs tries to remedy this with a new book about women who gave birth to extraordinary men, women who have been hidden not only behind their sons but also behind their husbands . . . presented as footnotes that are out of context. In The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, Tubbs resurrects thes