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.