“The Three Mothers”: A book review

Communist Party USA

  The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, Anna Malaika Tubbs, New York: Flatiron Books, 2021. “All our achievements are Mom’s” —Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X Anna Malaika Tubbs has written about Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin to honor Black motherhood and to defy historical “erasure” (214). She proclaims that “Black women exist — and exist positively” (5). The lives of these three women may seem less than remarkable, but Tubbs, herself a Black mother, reminds readers that Black motherhood is, in itself, courageous — a form of subversion in response to American racism: Those of us who nurture the lives of those children who are not supposed to exist, who are not supposed to grow up, who are revolutionary in their very beings are doing some of the most subversive work in the…

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“The Three Mothers”: A book review