Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Three Mothers Who Shaped a Nation with Anna Malaika Tubbs

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

In today’s episode, Sharon chats with author and scholar Anna Makaika Tubbs about the mothers of three well-known Civil Rights activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Anna, influenced by the Black women in Hidden Figures, began researching Black mothers, a demographic that often goes unnoticed or even erased. Through their own stories, and through their love for their sons, the mothers of these three men significantly impacted their lives. Sharon and Anna discuss the art of research, and how intricate the work is, especially when writing narrative non-fiction, and how the writer ultimately has a responsibility to relay the truth through the craft of the story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Anna Malaika Tubbs, and she has written an absolutely fascinating book called The Three Mothers. And you are not going to want to miss this conversation about the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr. and other famous men from the civil rights movement and how they shaped their sons and how mothers shaped the world. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today because this book has been absolutely fascinating and I'm so excited to share with people who listen some of the history that you have studied, some of the really important themes that you bring up that apply to all of us today. So thank

you so much for joining us on. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to it. Can you tell everybody, first of all, what you do, what you study, and then tell us about your book? Cause I'm so excited to talk about it. Absolutely. So I'm Anamalika Tuv. I am the author of the three mothers, how the mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped the Nation. I did my undergraduate work at Stanford University. I majored in anthropology, and then I did my master's at the University of Cambridge in multidisciplinary gender studies, and my PhD is in sociology, also from the University of Cambridge, and I was very fortunate to be a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge scholar. With that in mind, I would

love to talk more about your book. What made you feel like I need to write a book about Martin Luther King Jr.'s mother? Tell me more about how you came to that subject. Yeah. So, you know, I feel like with any big accomplishment that we have in our lives, obviously there's so much that leads to it. So I try to fast forward. There were a ton of influences before I started my PhD, but I'll start when I started my PhD. I was incredibly inspired by Margot Lee Shetterly's work in Hidden Figures. And for those that haven't read the book, but maybe have heard of the film, yes, incredible. And I was inspired, but also really angry that this was the first time I'd heard these names. And this was the first time I knew that Black women were

the brains behind NASA, that they were the mathematicians. And I said, this is not a mistake. It's not that someone thought to say, oops, we forgot to tell you it was Black women all along. Sorry about that. You know, it was instead, this doesn't fit our notion of who the leaders and heroes of our country are this kind of racist and patriarchal notion. And therefore we're going to sweep these stories under the rug. And I said, I'm going to be somebody who finds other hidden figures. I had an incredible mom. She was a lawyer. She advocated for women's rights, both in the U S as well as abroad. That's why we traveled so much with her work. And she was always telling me how important it was to pay attention to mothers, how you could learn so much about a society based off of how

they treated mothers. And so I thought, okay, you know, something my mom has always told me, I want to also do this project on hidden figures. I'm going to do something around mothers who have been forgotten and erased. And I think quite universally, many mothers feel erased, many mothers feel unseen, many mothers feel unthinked. And this is further exacerbated for Black mothers who are the only ones who have been deemed the givers of non-life through our children, that it was written in law that our children were not ours, but that they were somebody else's property. So I said, I need, this is going to be a very specific claim I'm making about the need to really celebrate the ways in which Black women have created life, not only through

their children, but through their works, through their activism, and how they've fought against this dehumanization, even when people were trying to deny their own lives. And then I thought about the civil rights movement, because we so often come back to the civil rights movement, we're celebrating it all the time, we are thinking about how our nation is aligning with what our civil rights heroes had in mind. But we think about it from a very male perspective. And so I also then figured out that their moms were all born within six years of each other. And their famous sons then were born within five years of each other. So Baldwin and King and Malcolm X are all born within five years of each other. So I could bring these three stories together,

these really diverse, complex stories together through time and through chronology. And I could also speak about the civil rights movement. I could speak about where we are as a nation today. I could celebrate Black motherhood generally, while also really celebrating these individuals and what they stood for and the fact that they were activists long before their sons or even thoughts in their minds. And it just started to take form from there. Most of it is original research. I really had to uncover the details of their lives because again, like I said at the beginning, these were things that were swept under the rug. It wasn't this normal notion that mothers were the ones who had ushered these sons to greatness, that the sons were really walking

in their mother's footsteps. That doesn't really fit in our mind when we're thinking about the self-made man. So it was really, and has been an incredible journey to learn about these three women, to show the world who they were. I would love to hear more about the forces that shaped these three mothers and what kind of commonalities did you find between them? The way in which they teach their children what it means to be Black in America, the first is that they have to tell them about some of the ugliness of the world. Like we said earlier, there is no choice for Black mothers that their children need to be informed about what they might face outside of their home. But number two, they can't be defined by that, that they have to remember really stand your ground. Another saying, through words, we can help inspire people. And then number three, thinking about that they are not alone, that there's generations of freedom fighters who came before them. They tell them about their family histories.

They tell them about the locations that raised them as well. And then number four, finding love, finding joy. All of that is an essential part of this fight for our freedom. We cannot allow that to be robbed from us because that's when we've lost, but instead to hold on to our happiness and to our humanity and the fact that we are complex individuals who will face some of these harder times, but we also have all of these strategies that our families have developed to fight against that and claim our lives. I love that. What was their relationship with their sons like as their sons grew into adolescence and manhood when so many, so many people have very stereotypical issues with teenagers and like my parents are dumb and know nothing and they're lame and cringy. Yeah. Different for each of them, certainly. So with MLK Jr. in

Alberta, there's letters where he talks about how his mom really is the one who believes in him and his like educational journey. So he's the second in their family. His sister, Christine is also very smart, brilliant girl. And the family really prioritizes all their kids' education. And as the eldest, you know, she's starting school. And MLK at a young age is asking his mom, he wants to start school at the same time as she does. And he wants to be able to go and start college early even. And so Albrecht really believes in him and says, okay, you want to start doing these things. So even at one point he was sent back from school because he was too young to go there, but he was so thankful that his mom believed in him and allowed him to try it out kind of thing.

And so he started college really young. He took a test that allowed high school students to start college a year early. So he wanted to start alongside or close to his sister starting, I guess it was this kind of competitive nature that they had and supportive nature that they had. So he talks about his mother being his mother dear and the best mother in the world and how he loved her so much. Even in MLK Senior's autobiography,

he says that Alberta understood her children better than anybody else, which I think so many moms can relate to that feeling. And so MLK would call and write her letters and ask her for the things he needed and the comforts from home. So it seems like they had a very, very close relationship and really understood each other and that he saw her as his confidant and the person that he really looked up to in addition to his father. But there was so much love and understanding between the two of them.

With James Baldwin, he was Burtis Baldwin's first out of nine children. And when he was born, she was a single mother. So for the first several years of their lives, it's just the two of them, several years of his life. And then she remarries or she marries for the first time, David Baldwin. We know from James Baldwin's works that David Baldwin was actually extremely abusive. And so James Baldwin sees himself as his mother's right-hand man, and he helps her through the birth of her eight other children. He wants to help with them and getting them to school and all of these things to make sure that they are also supported. But he really adores his mom. And he talks about how she is the one who believes he can become a writer because she's a writer herself. And so she really stands up to this abusive father figure to make sure that James can go and see plays and can pursue this passion of his and this writing. And when James is going to start his writing fellowship in France, he speaks about how the hardest moment for him is to tell his mom that he's leaving.

Because again, that's like his best friend. And so with the two of them, extremely close as well. And they're even buried next to each other. So like I said, Burtis has nine children, but she's buried next to her eldest. If you go and try to visit James Baldwin's grave, you'll see that there's a plaque that says Burtis in one corner, James in the other, and Baldwin in the middle. With Malcolm X, I've left him until the end because he experienced so much tragedy. Their family experienced so much tragedy because they were, Louise and Earl, her husband, were these radical activists, these Marcus Garvey followers. They were pursued by the KKK and another group called the Black Legion. But this was part of their

strategy. You know, they wanted to be known and recognized as these agitators. That's what they were there to do in these different places throughout the Midwest. But this also resulted in the murder of Earl Little, Malcolm X's father, and then the institutionalization of Louise Little, because a white male physician said that she was imagining being discriminated against. And this was enough to put her away against her will for around 25 years of her life. Her children were taken from her when they were incredibly young, and they were placed into separate foster homes. And this is where we then start to know more about Malcolm X and his path as Detroit Red. It was not that he was raised in a household that didn't have parents or a mother who cared deeply about him, who were putting all of their effort into raising their children and creating change. It was that, like so many Black families in American history, there were systems that were working against them and separated them very strategically and very intentionally.

Again, he had this very well-educated mother, actually. And so him joining the Nation of Islam for him felt like a return to his mother. There is letters that I include in the book where he speaks about how all of his accomplishments were his mom's and how everything he was learning from Elijah Muhammad felt very familiar to what his mother had already taught him as a young boy. So their relationship, it's been like for Black families over the century of American history. Was he able as an adult to visit her, secure her freedom? What happened when he came to adulthood? Yeah. So after 25 years of the family trying desperately to have her released from the institution, because there's certain notes that we can see from the hospital to the state saying she's continuing to resist our care. She's continuing to resist us.

And at certain points there's questions and requests for the children to come and visit her because one of her children was less than one years old when they were taken from her. And the doctors say, no, we don't advise that she should be visited, et cetera. So there are some times when the kids are allowed to come, but then we also know that for a lot of it, they're restricted from seeing their mother. Malcolm X tells Alex Haley that he'd sort of given up on hope that his mother was ever going to be released. So he kind of ignores this part of his life for a while. But when she's released after around 25 years, he is able to see her. And they have a dinner where she's reunited with her eight children.

And he says to Alex Haley how much he loved her and how he realizes that this was, again, an attack on his family. But it's only a few months after that, really less than a year, that he's assassinated. So they never had a chance to fully get to know each other again. He was robbed of her for 25 years. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where re-watched every single episode of the office with insane behind the scenes stories hilarious guests and lots of laughs every wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays,

we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I would love to hear from you more. First of all, I know people who are listening to this are always so curious about the research process. What is it like to try to piece together biographies of Black mothers? How does one even go about that when so much effort has been taken to make sure that this kind of information is hidden? When it's not cataloged and recorded in the same way that say the history of a president

would be? You know what I mean? What is it like to try to do this research? It is incredibly difficult and I think the easiest way to kind of explain my process is just to use a specific example. So I'll kind of walk through Bertis Baldwin, for instance. So she, I knew from starting with James Baldwin's works that he was close to his mother, that there were certain characters in his book that were based on his mother, like Go Tell It on the Mountain. I knew that he wrote certain things about the fact that she never knew her own mother and that she called her sister the mother that she knew best kind of thing but that was really all we had in terms of Burtis Baldwin and so the way I start is to first go to

scholars of the men the famous sons were kind of my entry point and to ask them was there anything that they could tell me about Burtis Baldwin that they knew about or where I should ask or who I should reach out to I also like I referenced, go through the works of the men, any transcripts, any other speeches, any interviews, any books, anything other people have said about them as well. And I start to piece together post-its saying, okay, this is what I think, here's something that I know, or here's something that I have a question mark around, or what is this character telling us about Burtis? And then based off of the information, I go to local historians and the places where each of the women lived. So with Burtis, I'm calling people in Deal Island, Maryland. I'm asking for specific

records around birth certificates, if they exist, death certificates, land deeds for her family members. Burtis never appeared on any census data. I don't have that for her, but I do know that her mother passed at some point and that her sister is someone who raises her. So from that, I'm able to track her sister, Beulah, and find her in all the census data. And I could find a land deed for Beulah and say, okay, this is where Burtis lived at this point. I'm able to see then a death certificate for her mom. That's how I'm able to now know, even though the family told me she was born in 1903, that's what they thought. She was actually born in 1902 because her mother's death certificate says 1902. From there, I can see that Alfred, her father has a house and a land deed as

well, but he remarries. And at this time, it was very common. I have to pull context from history. It was very common for remarried men for their children to go and live with an older sibling rather than in that family. So that's when Burtis goes and lives with Beulah. I can track that and I can see that her father sold his house and moved away. So that's just the beginning. And this is maybe, you know, the first chapter where I'm trying to just piece together kind of a, this is where this person's from, and this is the person who raised them. But that required already five different sources to piece that paragraph together. So this is kind of a snowball of, okay, what happens next? How do

I track this? How do I fill in the blanks? It was helpful for me as a sole researcher and a PhD student when I was writing this book to have the entry point of the famous sons, because that gave me certain moments. You know, I know now Burtis is in this hospital on August 2nd to give birth to James Baldwin. But what happened before this, before she was the mother of this famous person, that those are the parts that were the hardest to find. And in the moments where I couldn't specifically find what happened to her, I could think about what was happening in the context of where she was born, what was happening in the context of American history. So the book also walks us through

these moments for our nation, but through the experiences of Black girls, Black women, Black mothers, etc. So that's just kind of a snippet. I had to get very creative. Oh, and then I also was able to call some of her living family members who were willing to speak with me. So reaching out to them through letters or even on Twitter is how I actually got a hold of one of her grandchildren. It's kind of a cold call out there. And he was so gracious to sit down with me and then kind of move forward from there and share, you know, things, pictures with me or just stories. And I could get the essence of Burtis through knowing someone who actually loved her and knew her well.

So many people think research is Googling, right? I mean, I'm not wrong. And certainly there's a lot of great information to be turned up on the internet. But when you are doing original research, I think that is, it's a fascinating process. And it's such an eye-opening for people who have never done original research in these sort of social science spaces, where we're not talking about hard sciences, where you're conducting experiments, et cetera. But original research is incredibly time-consuming, detail-oriented. It requires a tremendous amount of initiative. Like you're saying, who is their grandson? Can I find them on social media? Can I write letters? Will they speak to me? Can I get a picture? What is the land deed? I need to call all these people, original research is an incredible undertaking and it doesn't just involve, yeah, it doesn't just involve like typing in somebody's name and then being like,

I got the deets. I'm writing a book. Yeah. And then even tracking, you know, misspellings in history is how people will refer to her mother differently. And someone will say this, or even family members saying, this is happened another family member saying no this is what happened and there you say who am I to say what the truth is I don't know um so I do appreciate that because one of my goals for the book was that it would be well written and that people would want to enjoy the narrative of it I write fiction and non-fiction as well and so that was a goal of mine but I think a lot of people then don't appreciate the fact that yes I, I told a good story, but I uncovered these facts.

It wasn't just available to me. I wasn't just, like you said, Googling and saying, oh, that'll be good for the story. Let me bring that in and write this beautiful narrative. But instead, I was uncovering the facts, piecing together this information, and then also turned it into a book that you would want to read and to you. So thank you. Narrative nonfiction, I think is one of the hardest genres to write. And it's my favorite genre when it's done well, but it's one of those, you know, like as a fiction writer,

you get to determine what the, what the context is, what the details are. And it's still difficult to be a good fiction writer. But narrative nonfiction requires an allegiance to the truth while also attempting to craft a beautiful story for the reader. And sometimes the truth, the allegiance to the truth doesn't turn up what you really wish would be a great dramatic plot point. You know what I mean? The truth is inconvenience sometimes. No, it's very, very true. I mean, and I had to be very aware that I not kind of glorify the

mothers or over romanticize the experience of motherhood, but to be honest as much as I possibly could in saying, these are the details, this is what happened. Or even, you know, Malcolm X sometimes said, I don't know, my mom, I thought was really hard on me. She thought that he, she was harder on him and that her eldest was her favorite, et cetera. You know, these are parts of motherhood and these are really, and then also to be very clear when I was filling in the blank with my own personal opinion. Quite often, we get a little messy with that as scholars, and we want the story to make sense. So we just say, this is what happened. This was fact. Instead of saying, I imagine this might have been what happened,

or I can say that this is how it could have felt, but I couldn't interview them. And I also like to say that two books that were inspiring for me, Margalit Shetterly's Hidden Figures, like I said, but also Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and the triad of these three stories and this powerful narrative. But the difference was I was trying to emulate their work, but I couldn't interview the people that I was writing about. And so I had to piece together these sources of history that quite often had been filtered through men. And so I then also had to go back and question the few details that were out there. I had to find more. For instance, Louise Little, it had been said that she had gone crazy and how sad she'd gone crazy.

So her children were taken away from her as if it was her fault, you know, not done enough to take care of them. as if it was her fault, you know, not done enough to take care of them. When you dig further into that and you now know that she's this activist and that somebody said she was imagining being discriminated against and then she's institutionalized, we can't just say, oh, she went crazy and she was, she was institutionalized. said, we need to really dig further. So it was hard, but I'm proud of it. Hats off to you. Also. Yeah. Also understanding those cultural forces of men being able to institutionalize inconvenient

women that they wanted to silence. We read a book in my book club called the woman they could not silence, which is about a narrative nonfiction book about a woman who was institutionalized, um, for decades by her own husband because she had too many contrary ideas and she was too mouthy and she was too much trouble. And she had like an eight month old, you know what I mean? Uh, and a bunch of other children. And so that, that historic context of men being permitted to institutionalized, inconvenient, loud, opinionated women, and say that they're crazy, say that they're hysterical, you know, that phrase of crazy has been used, has been weaponized for

centuries. I mean, the Salem witch trials, for instance, this is another example of these women are outspoken. They must be doing sorcery. Yeah. The phrase crazy, the word crazy is such a weapon that is wielded against women and particularly black women. Absolutely crazy. So I would love to hear what takeaways did you have when you were doing all of this incredible amount of original research, piecing together this narrative? What did you learn that you feel like we can apply as mothers or as people who care about mothers to today? So much, but I'll just choose one of the things that I learned. Mothers generally are feeling overlooked, are burned out, are tired, are feeling unsupported. And these are not just feelings, but these are, again, systems working against us that do not support the role of motherhood, that look at it as if it's this kind of weak thing, as if it's not that big a deal.

We don't appreciate the many decisions mothers are making day in and day out, the sacrifices they're making. We speak about mothers as if they are these selfless beings without needs for others to consider needs of their own. And that this notion of erasing the mother and erasing her impact is even larger than I really knew until I started to dive into this work and that we, more of us need to address this. We need to pay attention to this. And it's not only mothers that should be concerned about this. It's not okay. It's not only hurting mothers when we are dying in a maternal health crisis, one that is further, further exacerbated for black mothers, but a crisis that's for all of us. Mothers are dying in a maternal health crisis, one that is further exacerbated for Black mothers,

but a crisis that's for all of us. Mothers are dying more in the U.S. across the board than other industrialized nations. And we should care about that. And not only moms. It's not only bad for moms if they have to walk away from their jobs during a pandemic because there's no nets in place to catch them. That's bad for all of us. It's bad for our national economy. It's bad for our teams when we lose different representation.

It's not only bad for moms, again, if they are burned out, if they are experiencing high levels of postpartum depression, if they are feeling unseen. And often when we say, okay, I'm gonna tell you all about moms today or something, let's say, people just stop listening if they're feeling unseen. And often when we say, okay, I'm going to tell you all about moms today or something, let's say people just stop listening. If they're not moms, they're like, this must affect them. But what I want is more people to say, no, this affects all of us. And then very specifically with black mothers, the things that could have helped Alberta,

Burtis and Louise, if we still don't have those policies in place today, they are long, long, long overdue. And we need to start thinking about why we don't support policy that would help moms, why we don't have a universal parental leave yet. That's something we should be embarrassed about as a nation, quite frankly, why we don't have universal pre-K or affordable and quality childcare for every child. We're just not supporting moms. And it's just opened my eyes to so much. And again, how that's even worse for Black mothers. And we really will not be able to move forward. Like my mom would always say, everything can relate back to this treatment of motherhood. And I want more people to pay attention to that because there's a lot of these issues that we could actually crack and start to solve

if we spent more time prioritizing the role of motherhood. So true. And so important to realize that even if your children are grown, even if you are a man, even if you are a childless by choice, no matter who you are, the role of mothers is absolutely integral to society and mothers being overlooked, overwhelmed, ill-equipped, pushed out, dying, that affects the entire nation. We're not just talking about like, well, moms should have nice strollers. That's not what we're talking about. These are very, very significant, huge issues that affect generations of people. They've affected us as descendants and they will continue to affect our descendants. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually, I did a TED talk about this recently. If you want

to hear more about it. You can look that up. But it's entirely about how the stories we're telling about mothers are keeping us from supporting mothers are making it seem like an issue that only moms should care about when instead we all need to start paying attention. What is the title of your Ted talk? How mothers shape the world. Find me a way that is not impacted by mothers. Yeah, exactly. And I talk about obviously the three women that I studied and how, you know, so many people ask me this question now of why, how, why were they erased? How did this happen? Now that you've shown us how important they were, how did this happen? Um, and in the talk, I'm really speaking about how it's not only them the erasure of three black mothers stories is just a symptom

of this larger thing and it's it's become almost invisible because we're not mapping the moments where it's very clear you know like you said that we were talking about with the Salem witch trials and when we're talking about a woman being institutionalized because her husband was allowed to do that, there are laws that have been written that said it's okay for a husband to hurt his wife if she's not acting appropriately. These are tangible moments that have, even though the laws don't exist as much anymore, they still are impacting us now. That's kind of where I'm moving forward with my next project is mapping these moments that it's tangible and that we're not being called crazy anymore or being told we're making something up or that these are just our feelings. But in fact, that it is something we

can touch and say, this is how it was institutionalized. This is how it became a system and a system that amongst many other things produced a world that doesn't value the stories of Black mothers. This has been absolutely fascinating, your book, The Three Mothers. If you are interested in sociology, if you're interested in history, if you are interested in social justice, there's a huge variety of people that I feel like would really love reading this book. So I so appreciate your time. I so appreciate your perspective.

And where can people find you, Anna? Yes, you can go to AnnaMalikaTubbs.com. You can find all my socials on there, the TED Talk on there, articles I've written, etc. And you can stay up to date if you sign up for the newsletter on my future projects. Thank you again so much. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was

produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.