From the Archives – Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
Anna Malaika Tubbs is the author of The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Balwdin Shaped a Nation. She is also a Cambridge Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a BA in Anthropology, Anna received a Master’s from the University of Cambridge in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies. Outside of the academy she is an educator and DEI consultant. She lives with her husband, Michael Tubbs, and their son, Michael Malakai.
Take it away, Anna!
What inspired you to write about these women?
I have always been passionate about correcting the erasure of Black women. When I started my PhD I knew I wanted to bring attention to Black women who had been wrongfully forgotten. We often hear the saying that “behind every great man is a great woman,” a saying that really bothers me, because most likely in such cases that woman is right beside the man, if not leading him. So I wanted to think about things differently and introduce the woman before the man. I believe mothers are some of the most underappreciated and unseen people in society and I felt it was time to honor them with the attention and credit they deserve. With all of this in mind, I dove into researching mothers of famous Black men. When I came across Alberta’s, Berdis’s, and Louise’s stories that were filled with nuance, diversity, as well as similarities and intersections as a result of the closeness in their birthdays as well as their famous sons’ birthdays, I just knew I had to dive deeper and share their names with the world. Their lives offer guidance and encouragement for Black women today, they show us different ways to be women, Black women, Black mothers, activists, educators, and much more. They remind us how difficult the world can be while also showing us ways to actively change it.
Who are some of your favorite authors working in women’s history today?
I have so many, but I’ll list a few!
Isabel Wilkerson – what she was able to do with The Warmth of Other Suns and now Caste is deeply inspiring. Her research is crucial and her ability to translate years of work into beautiful narratives that allow us to understand difficult concepts easily is something I try to emulate.
Patricia Hill Collins – her extensive sociological work on all aspects of Black womanhood and Black feminism over decades provides the basis of so many projects, interventions, and policies that impact our lives. You simply cannot do research on anything concerning Black women without engaging in something Patricia Hill Collins produced.
Melissa Harris-Perry – She is the kind of public intellectual I hope to become. She is brilliant and she uses her work to inspire change within, but more importantly beyond, the Ivory tower. She reminds all Black women of our worth and the treatment we deserve even if we’ve been denied it time and time again in the United States. Sister Citizen is one of my all-time favorite books.
How can your book help us better understand the civil rights movement as well as our current political/social climate?
At the center of The Three Mothers is a discussion of the dehumanization of all Black people. Motherhood is about creation, the giving of life, and this role becomes even more powerful in communities that are denied humane treatment on a daily basis. We as a Black community are continuing a long-fought struggle for our humanity, dignity, and worth to be recognized. This book, by focusing on Black motherhood, acknowledges that fight and shows how despite the many ways that our humanity has been denied in our nation, we have continued to find ways to humanize ourselves, give life, and move our country forward.
The Three Mothers provides a perspective of a century of U.S. history through the eyes of Black mothers. Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little were born within six years of each other, the first was born in the late 1890s, and the last of the three to die, passed away in the late 1990s. The book is a lesson on the way history has impacted the current fight we find ourselves in from the perspective of identities we do not highlight enough. We have much to learn from the generation before our revered civil rights heroes, we have much to learn from Black women, and we have much to learn from Black mothers.
Question for you – Who would you say are women warriors of today?
In Women Warriors, I concentrated on women for whom battle was not a metaphor. By that standard, some of the most amazing modern women warriors are the Kurdish women who fought against Isis. They are the subject of a new book by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, The Daughters of Kobani. I loved her previous book, Ashley’s War and I’m looking forward to this one.
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Want to know more about Anna Malika Stubbs and The Three Mothers?
Check out her website: https://annamalaikatubbs.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @annas_tea_
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historical novelist Diana Giovinazzo.
175 Days of Bad News
I am slowly packing away my research materials for The Dragon from Chicago.* It is always harder than I expect. I have small stashes of material that I did not file at the time because I wasn’t sure where they should go. I stumbled across a stack of draft chapters that I never put away, probably because the project boxes were already full. (A problem I have not resolved in the interim.) And somehow I need to find room in the permanent bookshelves for the books currently stored on the rolling project bookshelf**—not an easy task.
In the course of dealing with the project bookshelf, I realize that there are a number of very good books that I never shared with you. Luckily, it’s never too late for a book review or two.
I think of The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs and Hitler’s First Hundred Days by Peter Frisch as a set, bookending the moment when Hitler became the German chancellor in January 1933.
The two books are different in structure and tone.
Barth and Friederichs take the reader day by day from November 17 1932 through January 30 1933. Each day opens with two or three newspaper headlines and is told in short segments that tell the story from different perspectives—a technique the authors describe as a “documentary montage.” Their goal is the let the story emerge without commentary based on hindsight. The result is powerful. (They also include a useful timeline at the end, which helped me keep a handle on the chronology of events at a time when things were moving very quickly.)
Hitler’s First Hundred Days has a more traditional narrative structure but is just as powerful. Frisch looks closely at the speed and brutality with which the Nazis built the structure with a terrifying combination of violence and parliamentary action—and the absence of resistance with which their actions wer met. His purpose is to understand how “a total fascist state that in January 1933 was highly contested rather improbable was widely accepted and broadly realized one hundred days later.”
Together, The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s First Hundred Days give a reader a clear sense of the steps that allowed Hitler to take power and how the Nazis consolidated their position once they were in power. It is a chilling picture.
*Coming August 6 to your favorite purveyor of books. Which feels simultaneously like a long time from now and tomorrow.
**In theory, I can pull it next to my desk so that I can grab books as I need them. In reality, by the time I need to grab books , it is already too heavy to move. Besides, standing up and walking across the room multiple times a day gives me a moment to bend and stretch—always a good thing.
In which I finish reading Rin Tin Tin
Last Sunday I sat down and finished the last sixty pages of Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. I had been reading it on and off over the last six months in small bites. Sometimes I put it aside because another book called my name. For one reason or another. (The Girls of Atomic City, for instance.) But often I put it aside because it was so intense that I needed a little break.
The intensity took me by surprise. I have no emotional attachment to Rin Tin Tin as a cultural icon. I am not old enough to have seen the The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin when it ran in prime time and have no memory of watching it in reruns on Saturday mornings. (On the other hand, I have fond memories of seeing an occasional episode of Sky King.) I finally pulled the book off my shelf, where it had sat unread for a decade, because My Own True Love and I were watching The Thin Man movies and he wondered which dog appeared in the movies first, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, or Asta.*
Rin Tin Tin is alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking. Orleans begins with the story of a man’s love for a dog that he rescued from the battlefields in World War I. The book then moves through the world’s love first for films and then television programs that initially starred and later featured characters based on the original Rin Tin Tin. It ends with a handful of people who were obsessed with Rin Tin Tin, both as an animal and as an intellectual property, including legal battles over control of the dog’s name, image, and descendants.
Orleans sets the Rin Tin Tin story against a rich backdrop of related stories, including:
- The development of German Shepherds as a working breed by by a German cavalry officer named Max von Stephanitz using various traditional German herding dogs in the early twentieth century.
- The changing use of dogs in film and television.
- The shift of dogs from outdoor working animals to pets, and the related growth of kennel clubs and obedience training.
- The Nazi idolization of German Shepherds as pure-bred “Aryan” dogs—and Hitler’s relationship with his own dogs.
- The recruitment of dogs for the United States Army’s K-9 Corps in World War II. (This was one of the points at which I had to set the book down for a while. I had learned about the K-9 corps previously when we visited historical Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Orleans looks at the story in more depth, which made it even more distressing as far as I was concerned.)
- Why Westerns were so popular after World War II
As is often the case with Orleans books, she includes her experience of reporting the story, bringing the reader through the process.
In short, Rin Tin Tin is a masterful piece of storytelling.
*Rin Tin Tin by a long shot. He first appeared in silent movies, beginning in 1922. Also, as Orleans points out, Rin Tin Tin was a real dog who played fictional characters. Lassie and Asta were fictional characters in novels adapted for film. Not the same thing at all.