Black Motherhood Shaped America: A Hard but Hopeful Story Played Out Against the Odds

<p>A new book makes a multi-generational examination of the origin stories of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin to understand how they were shaped and by whom – their mothers.</p> <p>Anna Malaika Tubbs excavated the lives of these extraordinary women – Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin – who, in raising and nourishing and shaping their sons, pushed them to greatness. Tubbs’s account, <em>The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation</em> is a fascinating and nuanced celebration not only of these women and their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, but to the Black mothers throughout American history who resiliently pushed back against abhorrent efforts at dehumanization that went so far as to legally declare their children as someone else’s property.</p>