Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Anna Malaika Tubbs on Significant Mothers

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, we celebrate Mother’s Day! Liza is joined by bestselling author Anna Malaika Tubbs to discuss her book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Anna and Liza dive into the lives of these incredible mothers who have historically been ignored, and they acknowledge their roles in raising and shaping sons who forever changed the course of our nation.  We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!  The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika TubbsThe Life of Louise Norton Little by Deborah JonesThe Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson 

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we're talking about the kind of significant other pretty much everyone has, moms. But not just any moms. The amazing author, advocate, and scholar, Anna Malaika Tubbs, is here to talk about the remarkable subjects of her book, The Three Mothers, How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Ana, thank you so much for joining us today. Your three subjects are all equally fascinating and important. So why don't you tell us where you would like to begin?

Oh, I love that question. Oh, it's so hard. But first, thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here and happy Mother's Day, everybody. Yes. Yes. Yes. So I'll just start with alphabetical order by first name. So there's no favorites or anything, but I'll give a little background on each of them. And Alberta Williams King is where we will begin. This is Dr. MLK Jr.'s mother. And she was born in Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1900s. She was influenced by her parents

primarily, who were the leaders of Ebenezer Baptist Church. So up until this book, we understood this incorrectly. A lot of people used to think that this was MLK Senior's church, but in fact, it was Alberta's parents' church. They were the ones who founded it. And- May I just ask quickly, how did you set that to rights? How did you discover that? So actually with the church, when you go on the tour of all of the amazing things in Atlanta around the King family, they will tell you that her parents were the founders of the church. But for some reason, in our kind of shared American understanding, everybody has called the church MLK Senior's church. And I think then we just came to believe

that he was the one who passed the church on to his son, because he was also a reverend. So it just almost was an easier story to tell that one passes it on to the other when, in fact, it's been in this family for a long time. This was part of his maternal heritage. So with Albert's parents, they believed that faith was always intertwined with social justice, that these two things could not be separate of each other. And they were a family of privilege. They worked very hard to establish that. All of the men in their family went to Morehouse. The women in their family went to Spelman. They were very well educated. And they believed that that wasn't something that made them better than anybody else, but instead that it was a tool for a larger fight for our

freedom as Black people. So they were some of the very first members of the NAACP. They raised Alberta to believe that you could really invoke change through marches and through boycotts. So they never used the word nonviolent. This was something that later became more popular, but it's basically the exact same strategies. So later, of course, MLK Jr. is really walking in the footsteps that were established by his maternal grandparents and carried forward by his mother, Alberta. And even in MLK Sr.'s autobiography, he talks about the fact that he could not have become who he was without his wife. And he really means this much more than most of us when we talk about our partners. I think we all say it as something that's sweet and romantic, but he literally means this because when he met her, she was this well-established, again, well-educated.

She had her bachelor's degree as well as a teaching certificate. She had all of this kind of background of the church and her parents behind her. And his friends made fun of him because he fell in love with her. But he described himself as just a green country boy. And he did not have this access to the privilege and opportunities that she did. And he was actually considered illiterate. And so to have this well-educated woman and this boy who kind of arrives in Atlanta looking for opportunity and he falls in love with her. It's something that seemed really unlikely for her to love him back. But in fact, she does fall in love with his Southern charm, but she tells him you're not yet an educated man and I want to help you with that. So she helps to get him into Morehouse and she uses her own education. She

wanted to become a teacher to tutor him through his college education. So only a few years later, he graduates and becomes this incredible orator himself. And another powerful story, but one where he says himself, this could not have been possible without her. So that's just a little bit about Alberta Williams King. This is maybe pure conjecture that I'm leading you into. Bertha Williams King. This is maybe pure conjecture that I'm leading you into, but when you said that the foundation of the Ebenezer Baptist Church was misattributed to Dr. Martin Luther King's father's heritage and was in fact came through his mother, do you have any sense of what caused that

error? Do you think it's like the repetition of the name made it complicated? Or do you think that there's something a little bit more prejudicial about historians traditionally sort of even subconsciously leaning toward the importance of the father? Absolutely. I mean, it's patriarchy, definitely. It's definitely this intersection of patriarchy and racism and the way in which historians who have largely been men have tried to tell a story that makes more sense to them. And so in my experience with this research, we see evidence over and over again that the sons, the partners, husbands, all give credit to these three women. And then it was the scholars and historians who interviewed

them who just kind of pushed that to the side or made it a little footnote because it didn't fit the story that patriarchy tells us of who the leaders are. So it became easier and almost more comfortable to repeat a patriarchal narrative rather than say he was walking in the footsteps of his mother. Did you find that I've read a little bit of, I can't remember what it was typically. I can't remember what it was, typically. I can't remember what it was, and it could have come from your book, so forgive me if I'm forgetting that. But did you find that the way that she, not only the sort of obvious pillars of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s early life, the importance of the church and the importance of participating and being educated and the responsibility, the sense of responsibility. But I remember reading somewhere something about the way that she and the other women in his family spoke to him and continued to speak to him was

kind of in a class of its own because no one else had the moral authority to speak to him in that way. And I don't know if there's something that characterizes the type of maternal relationship she had with him. But if there is anything on that, I'd love to hear about it. Definitely. It's something that he actually referenced a lot in letters that he wrote to his mother. He always calls her Mother Dear and talking to her, especially once he goes to college, about how he tells everybody around him that he couldn't have been who he was without his mom. And these are very special moments because you both see his admiration and his respect for his mother, but you also see MLK Jr. as the son that he was, the very regular person who's asking her to send him his favorite shoes that he forgot or his favorite meals.

So it's very warm. And you can see this, I don't want to say unique relationship, but one that we just really hadn't appreciated in our understanding of him, that he really looked to her as a confidant, as a guide. He wanted to discuss his decisions with her. He was incredibly close to his maternal grandmother as well. He fell into a very deep depression when she passed away. So there is this respect that he has for the female leaders in his family. And certainly in the Black church,

it's something that often isn't spoken about enough, but that Black women are leaders in all of these different ways, but they are left relegated to the background, even though they're showing leadership, they're showing that they're at the forefront. The way we then tell the story puts them in the back, even though their actions were showing something completely different. And I think in the example of Alberta, this is exactly what's happening. She's clearly a leader in her family, clearly a leader in her church, and clearly a leader for her children. And her son saw that. Did she respond differently than her husband did when Dr. King was first sort of called upon to be the face or the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. And his father broke down and said, don't, you know, don't go home. You're going to you're in trouble. You're you're it's dangerous.

You won't be safe. Did his mother have a different response to that? Very challenging, terrifying moment, but also very galvanizing, obviously. Yeah. His mother was bedridden at times because she was so worried about her son. And there's a part in the book where I talk about a time in her life where she just couldn't get out of bed because she was so sad that he was going to be taken from her or something was going to happen to him. But she also had this sense of this is what he's been called to do. She's a person of faith. She believes that God has a

plan for him and that she can't interrupt that. She can't stand in the way of that. And so it's almost as if she takes on all of this worry and keeps it not to herself because she does mention it to her son, but it starts to have these internal effects on her that are visceral. And she is constantly dealing with this tug of war that I think a lot of Black mothers specifically can relate to. You're training your child to go out into the world and be who they're meant to be, despite all of the hatred that they might face, knowing that that is risky and how heartbreaking that is, that you want to just be able to support them in whatever their dreams are, support them in making this world more

equitable. But you're also aware that a lot of people are going to make that nearly impossible for them. And so you also don't want to be the person telling them that they can't make those changes or that they should be afraid. So this is definitely a tug of war that we see with her, as well as the other two mothers in the book. Did she have a relationship with Dr. King's wife that was in any way worth mentioning? Definitely. They have a lot of similarities, actually, Greta Scott King and Alberta, because both of them are these talented women, passionate. They are powerful in their own right. And then their stories are largely

erased by the partners who they join in this life journey. And so I think Alberta, although this was not something that I could say I had a letter on or anything to kind of confirm from a primary source, my own theory is that they saw something in each other that was very similar. Because Alberta, as I mentioned earlier, had these degrees, she wanted to become a teacher. But at the time, there was a law that stated that married women could not teach. So when she chose to get married, she had to walk away from her career formally. And this is why she then transfers those skills into coaching her husband and her children and is the leader of the church choir. So she's a teacher in all of these informal ways, but she cannot be recognized with the degrees that she's actually

earned. And then you kind of think about Coretta Scott King and the fact that she was this talented musician, an activist herself, and the way we've started to tell her story, even to this day, often erases her contributions, her intelligence. We forget even that we wouldn't celebrate MLK Day had it not been for her. You still see this constant erasure. And it's something that their daughter cares deeply about, Bernice King. She's always reminding her followers to think about the women in her family, to think about her mother, her grandmother, her aunt, because it's also incredibly dehumanizing to MLK Jr. when we think of him as this separate deity who didn't have the support system around him or

this family around him. So it's definitely a sad parallel between them, but probably they shared a lot of respect in seeing each other, even when the world wasn't seeing them. And also, I'm sure is much more difficult for a historian to find primary sources on women the further back we go. Definitely, definitely. But a lot of my research came from experts in the suns and me reaching out to them saying, do you have any archives or letters that you could share with me? And they did. And no one had asked for them before. But especially this one with Alberta, it was obvious. Why hadn't we questioned before that this church was there long before MLK Sr. was? Right. Well, I'm excited for you to turn that gaze onto all sorts of other subjects to say, like, let's talk about the women who, Black women writing, because I also think that a lot of the scholars who studied these men before just really weren't thinking from that perspective. And I've been told many times that this was such a unique idea for a book. You know, how did I come up with it? And I'm thinking this is not unique. I'm surprised no one had written this before me. no one had written this before me. And I say in my TED Talk, you know, every year we celebrate MLK Day, it's around his birthday, you know, somebody else was there when he was born.

So I don't think I'm unique at all. But it is the greatest honor of my life, aside from my own mothering, to have introduced the world to these names. the world these names. Okay, let's go to Burtis Baldwin. So she was born in Maryland, a tiny town called Deal Island, Maryland, also in the early 1900s. 1902, if I'm not mistaken, she was influenced by tragedy in her own life. She lost her mother at a very young age. And in my research, I found that her mother's death certificate had the same month and year as Burtis's birth certificate. And so it was either in childbirth or something related to childbirth. And the reason that was written was hemorrhaging. So in this kind of darkness and sadness, Burtis grows up wanting to be somebody who always finds the light

and always finds love and healing and wants to help other people find that as well. And the way in which she tries to share that with other people is through her writing. So she believes in the power of language and words and communicating with others to see that light, not only in their own personal darkness, but also in a time where Jim Crow reigns supreme, how as a nation might we find that healing and confronting the darkness in order to find that light. And so she leaves her

tiny town when she's only a teenager. Who's raising her up to that point? Her father. Yeah, her father, but also her sister. So at some point, James Baldwin wrote a little bit. Well, he actually talks a lot about his mother again, to go back to something we were talking about before. But one of his more famous writings spoke about how the only mother that Burtis knew was her sister. So that was really helpful, this brief mention of her sister, because when I was doing my research and I was going through trying to find census data, Burtis didn't appear in any of the census data, but her sister did. So I was able to kind of locate and track Bertis' life through her sister. And Bertis moved in with her sister at one point when her father was remarried, because

this was kind of traditional that if a spouse remarried, these children might then go live with older siblings and that parent might kind of start over somewhere else. And so I was able to locate his, the father's land deed, his original kind of property. And then I also found out that he sold that property when he moved with his spouse and Burtis moves in with her sister. I was able to find her sister's land deed and then able to see that she leaves and goes to Philadelphia at one point and eventually ends up in New York in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, which is powerful. She's this writer. Maybe she has dreams of maybe publishing at some point. These, again, early 1900s for Black women, all of these are just the wildest dreams of seeing

what you might be able to create for your own life. But especially during the Great Migration and during the Harlem Renaissance, there's this sense of new and what might happen and can we dare to dream? And so for her to arrive there during this movement is really powerful. One of my favorite things in your entire book is when you say that the James Baldwin's teachers in school remarked on how beautiful her notes to them were. And I was so wishing that I had some evidence of her writing. So did you find anything? I only found one letter between her and James and it was available through the Smithsonian, the National African American History and Culture, that they did an online,

they have their online collection that's constantly growing. So it was powerful for me to have access to all of their data. But I wish that there was more that I could have seen. And this is something that I often say, I don't want my book to be the only thing that's ever written about these women. And I really hope this is just one of many, just like the sons have many books written about them. I hope that the family members who told me over the phone about Burtis's writing and all of them mentioned the letters that she gifted them on their birthday. This was her tradition of sharing her wisdom through letters, and this being the kind of birthday present they all looked forward to every year, and how one of

her daughters has continued this tradition for her. To publish those letters, I think, if my book allows people to see her as the writer that she was, that maybe there could be some collection of her essays that motivates all of us. I think it could be really beautiful. But I just know she's a writer solely because everybody talked about it. And there was this, and you have to kind of picture me during this stage of my life where I was sifting through so many documents constantly. And a lot of times I would end the day not having found any evidence of their lives. But one day I was scrolling through this book, another James Baldwin biography, because there are several.

tiny paragraph about a principal mentioning that the notes that she wrote to excuse her son's absences were enough for them to see where he inherited his writing from. And I'm thinking, you know, as a mother myself, how can I write such a beautiful note about my kid's sick? They're not going to make it today. My emails will never be held up as evidence of anyone else's inherited greatness. So it's like a goal I have now, you know, something beautiful about what happened. So and it was powerful that she was leaving these kind of pieces of evidence that of her talent of her artistry. And then we see when I talk about this in the book as well. At one point, James Baldwin was writing his play, Blues for Mr. Tarly, and he asked his family members to practice the lines for him. So he kind of work out a few things.

And Burtis was reading for one of the main characters. And he says to a friend, I almost thought of casting her. And so this is another moment where you see her talent as a performer. So there's evidence abounding. And I think it's also really important to reclaim that identity for her of the artist, the writer, because how many times have we seen this happen to mothers who have had to sacrifice their careers and then are not even given the respect of being able to hold the title of their craft. So that's something that I really am passionate

about returning to her. Fantastic. Yes, I could do with many more books on... I heard it pronounced Birdice. Is it Birdis? It's Birdis, yeah. Oh, dear. I mispronounced it.

But you know, it's hard. I was also, when I was about to record my audio book, my speech coach was like, I think it's Burtis. And so I called her grandson, who I've now become quite close to. And I said, can you tell me, I'm really sure you told me Burtis. And he said, it's definitely Burtis. Oh, man, you have the correct authority. I think I was going off of an old YouTube video. So anyway, apologies retrospectively for my mispronunciations of her name. But anyway, many more books on her. I'm ready for them. Yeah, that would be great. Okay. And then last but certainly not least. was Malcolm X's mother, and she was born in Grenada. Her birth date is not quite confirmed.

It's either the late 1800s or the early 1900s, but somewhere within there. She is mainly inspired by her grandparents, who were enslaved at one point, and then were able to gain their freedom. And so they are very focused on Black independence, self-sufficiency, never bowing down to your oppressor. They're constantly teaching her that it's better to fight and die trying to live freely than to live enslaved. is always thinking of this message of Black liberation and being radical and just standing up for yourself, very anti-white assimilation. So when she's a teenager, she leaves Grenada to go to Montreal, Canada to join her uncle, who has been living there for several years and is a member of the Marcus Garvey movement. And so she wants to join this movement as well. She eventually becomes a branch secretary. She writes for the Negro World newspaper. She's this radical, bold activist, again, who believes in Black nationalism and Black pride. So it should already start sounding like her son. It now becomes a lot

less surprising that Malcolm X becomes who he is. And she meets her husband, Malcolm X's father, because they were both organizers for Marcus Garvey. And they were so brave and so notable in that way that Marcus Garvey himself knew them and sent them strategically to cities in the Midwest to really incite this revolutionary spirit amongst Black community members. And that's what their kind of mission was. to be known by groups like the KKK and the Black Legion, these hate groups, because that's what they wanted. They wanted to kind of go and shake things up. But that put them in the path of danger quite often. And they're also parents. So they have eight children together. They believe in teaching their children these messages. And Luis was also multilingual. She wanted her children to have very global perspective of the movement, to know that they weren't alone,

and to also be aware of all of the strategies that people were employing across the world. Wow. I mean, I could literally sit and listen to you talk about these things forever. literally sit and listen to you talk about these things forever. And what was the most surprising thing in your research on Malcolm X's family? There are a lot of really shocking moments in Louise's life. I think for a lot of readers, she stands out the most because of just how terrible the treatment that she experienced was. So one example is that because she was this radical activist and there were all these strategies to control her and her family, her husband is murdered at one point and the murder is, I think, classified either a suicide or an accident, anything to make it so that she can't receive life insurance and support. And so she then goes into

a depression. She's definitely struggling. She has all of these children. She's a single mother in her 30s. She's very young. And at the same time, she's still trying to make ends meet. She knows how to take care of herself. She knows how to hunt. She knows how to garden. She is willing to do domestic work to take care of her children. But welfare workers start entering her home. And we've seen throughout American history that many families of color feel like this is more of an imposition, almost a way for the state to police them rather than help them and support them because they're not seen as human beings. And so Louise feels very controlled by this and she doesn't like it. So she's trying to get them out of her house and they start to kind of pull her children aside and tell

them that their mother is acting crazy and that they shouldn't believe all of the messages that their mother is trying to teach them about revolution and all of these things. And they also send a white male doctor to evaluate her and her condition. And in my research, I found the letter that this white male doctor wrote to the state where he says that Louise is, quote, imagining being discriminated against. Oh, boy. And he diagnoses her with dementia. And this is enough to put her away in a mental institution against her will for 25 years of her life. And each of her children were taken from her. One of them was still nursing. He was eight months old and they're removed from her and she's put

away behind bars really is how she kind of saw this experience as an imprisonment and a punishment for being a proud activist and standing up for herself. And after those 25 years, she's finally released. Her family finally wins this fight against the state. And there's a lot more that I could say about it, but that is, for me, one of the most shocking moments in the book. And so I was going to ask if any of the children were able to maintain relationships with her when she was incarcerated. Sounds as if they were. A little bit. How often were they able to see her? So our understanding, and ours is like all of us as a collective, of her time there

is only really filtered through letters that the state wrote back and forth to the doctors. And that's our only official record of what's happening while she's there, which of course, you know, this is not from her perspective, but that tells us, for instance, that sometimes her children wanted to visit her and the hospital would write back saying, she's not in a state where the children can see her and they would decide this for her. And the hospital would write back saying she's not in a state where the children can see her. And they would decide this for her. So it wasn't as if the children could decide. It wasn't as if Louise could decide. It was really in the pout their hands entirely. And there is actually now another book about Louise's life that was written by a scholar named Jessica Russell. And she was able to interview more family members as well. And they go deep into her story even more. And here you can hear

from the perspective of the family what was happening for them during this time. But the children had all been separated into foster homes. So they're also just trying to figure out their own lives, their children. Like they're really young. How old was Malcolm X when his mother was taken away? Oh, this is a good question. He was probably in like seventh grade or eighth grade. He was like a preteen. Yeah.

And where does he fall in the lineup of the kids? I can't remember. He's the fourth. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So he's in the middle of the bunch. And he goes to Boston with his half sister. And this is when he also then becomes eventually Detroit Red. And he's kind of going through this, what people have deemed like his gangster years.

years. And we kind of misunderstood this in history because it was actually that he was experiencing severe trauma. He had lost both his parents in this family that was so close-knit. And again, all about self-sufficiency. They grew their own food. There's a part of the book where I talk about how he loved to grow peas and he would sit next to his plants and dream about where he wanted to be in life. And we know he was very smart. He wanted to become a lawyer. And this is kind of a classic famous scene about Malcolm X that his teacher said that he couldn't because he was black. And so, of course, he's kind of rebelling against all of these things that have happened to him. He's angry.

Very much so. Yeah. He's angry, very much so. Yeah. And unfortunately, though, the way we've spoken about him is as if he wasn't educated, as if he came from a very different background. And of course, if that were his story, that would be fine. But it just isn't. We erased the fact that his parents, especially his mother, was a well-educated activist and she had passed that knowledge on to him. And so when he's going through this moment of withdrawal and all of the drugs are finally leaving his system that he's used to numb himself, he starts to return to her rather than it being this brand new discovery, which is how we used to speak about him. This was new knowledge to him and that he had taught himself from writing words from the dictionary, the English language. It was actually that a practice that she had at home with her kids when they got home from school was that they would read these articles from around the world, these global newspapers. And if they ever didn't know a

word, she would make them look it up in the dictionary and talk about it with each other and then continue reading. So all that we now see him doing while he's in prison is actually a return to his mom versus this being brand new or he's now suddenly, because of the Nation of Islam, become a brand new person. Now, suddenly, because of the Nation of Islam become a brand new person. He actually and again in the book, I mentioned a letter that he wrote to his siblings where he says, mom was the first one to teach us all of this. And all of our accomplishments are our mothers. Wow. I hope my children are listening. I know I say that all the time.

I'm like, I hope my kids at least read my book. And, okay. So I know that you personally have a significant, significant other in your personal life. Yes. Your husband is remarkable. He is. I don't know if you'd like to speak a little bit about him. Yeah, absolutely. So my husband, we've been together since we were in college. We're college sweethearts. But he was the youngest mayor of a major American city in American history. His name

is Michael Tubbs. And he was the mayor of Stockton, California, his hometown that he returned to after graduating from Stanford with his bachelor's and his master's degree. And really because of how young he was and this return to a city that at the time was the largest to go bankrupt and everyone thinking, why are you doing this? Why are you going back? And his commitment to where he came from and his community members and his belief that politics could be different led him to have a lot of attention. Two documentaries have been made about him. He's also the founder of Universal Basic Income. It was the first pilot in the United States was

in Stockton. And he's now still leading mayors for guaranteed income. And, you know, all of these cities have followed in his footsteps. So he is, he's amazing. So he deserves you then, basically. Thank you. I like that. I approve of the match. Is there somebody else in your professional life or your education, you know, your educational history or anything that you feel has been particularly formative or an author or historian? Isabel Wilkerson, certainly for me, a lot of my work, I'm trying to emulate what she's done for all of us. In The Warmth of Other Suns, she tells, of course, this beautiful Pulitzer Prize winning triple biography,

which is really similar to what I was trying to do with The Three Mothers. So she's definitely a huge inspiration to me. But also Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote Hidden Figures, and who really introduced the nation to the women, Black women behind NASA, who we should have known about all along. And so after I read her book, I was inspired and I said to my husband, I'm going to become somebody who tells the stories of other hidden figures. Well, that's great. Anamalika Tubbs, thank you so much for everything. A happy Mother's Day to you and to your mother and to your husband's mother. And I hope we get to talk to you again.

And please keep writing. I can't wait to read the next one. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you again to Ana Malaika Tubbs for joining us. Do check out her book, The Three Mothers. It's a lovely read and an important piece of historical scholarship. For more info on Anna and her upcoming projects, visit annamaliketubs.com.

We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out, so be sure to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening.