The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

The potency of Black motherhood as a driving force for change is a central theme in Tubbs’s academic work and is also reflected in this book. This is part of a wider cultural and scholarly effort to challenge the fact that the experiences and contributions of Black women have often been obscured and ignored. Tubbs uses her three subjects as case studies to correct this obscurity and to highlight their significance as agents for radical change in the 20th century. Moreover, her identification of her three women is intrinsically linked to their role as mothers: She chooses the mothers of arguably the most renowned Black male cultural leaders in 20th-century America and focuses on how their teachings and life lessons shaped their sons’ personalities. These women’s identities and duties as mothers are therefore essential to Tubbs’s recognition of them as historically significant Black female figures.

Tubbs stresses that she intentionally focuses on “the mother/son relationship” (8) to counter the pervasive erasure of Black mothers’ influence on their sons’ identities and to demonstrate that mothers shape their children’s personalities beyond gender boundaries. Her argument that Black motherhood has been scapegoated and controlled through history is key to this theme. During enslavement, Black mothers and their children were viewed as “commodities to control” (85) and exploited to sustain white supremacy. Enslavement deprived Black women of basic rights to their bodies and their children and engendered a culturally embedded disrespect of Black motherhood. Tubbs shows how this continued into the 20th century, evidencing how Black matriarchy was criticized by sociological debates such as the Moynihan Report. Mothers were blamed for family and community “dysfunction,” and scapegoated for the inequality that Black families experienced. Tubbs underscores that the stories of the three women counter such stereotypes and demonstrate how they empowered their children.

This theme argues that, although Black motherhood cannot be retrospectively extricated from the long history of racial violence and oppression, Black mothers in each generation have resisted dehumanization and acted as life-givers, rearing their children with hope and possibilities for self-development.

A constant strand through the book is Tubbs’s emphasis on Alberta, Louise, and Berdis actively shaping their families despite their different life paths and experiences. She shows how these women were not passive but, rather, full of active agency and intent, refusing to allow racism and economic oppression to restrict their children’s worlds. The three mothers prioritized their children’s education as a source of empowerment and saw motherhood’s “love and guidance” (133) as a means through which to shape the future for the better.

Tubbs explains that these women’s power for positive change was shaped by their personal identities, characters, and intellects. She stresses that they approached motherhood “based on their strong beliefs and their political awareness” (101). This awareness of their “participation in larger systems” (101) shaped their pedagogies as Black mothers as they strived to expand their children’s lives while boosting their own sense of worth and racial consciousness. Even if they did not consider their teachings as “radical,” Tubbs stresses that through their teachings, the three women equipped their sons with transformative power.