The introduction opens with George Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.

The biography, out now, does not shy away from recent events. “I want more Black women to do that today.” “I think it’s one of the reasons these three men, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Malcolm X had such a beautiful understanding of the human condition: Their mothers were so honest with them about their own humanity,” Tubbs said. It does a disservice to everyone, including children, when we don’t share and honor Black women’s full life stories, Tubbs said. 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. 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.

Anna malaika tubbs the three mothers