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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.”