“I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Contextualizing the women in their tumultuous times, Tubbs examines racism, police brutality, and life under Jim Crow to establish “the direct connection” between the mothers and their sons’ “heroic work.” The men, writes the author, “carried their mothers with them in everything they did.”Ī refreshing, well-researched contribution to Black women’s history.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Berdis, single when she gave birth to James, had joined the Great Migration, first living with relatives in Philadelphia and then moving to Harlem during the Renaissance, where she married James’ stepfather. Louise left her native Grenada for Montreal, where she joined her uncle as a Garveyite and married a fellow activist. In this book, I have tried my best to change this for three women in history whose spotlight is long overdue, because the erasure of them is an erasure of all of us.” Each woman believed in the importance of education for her children, and each advocated for civil rights: Alberta’s father was head pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and a co-founder of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP college-educated Alberta married preacher Michael King, and together they inherited leadership of the church. “I am tired of us not being recognized, I am tired of being erased. “I am tired of Black women being hidden,” she writes. Although “almost entirely ignored throughout history…ignored in ways that are blatantly obvious when the fame of their sons is considered,” these women, Tubbs asserts, deserve attention because they represent the struggles faced by Black women from the early 1900s through the 1960s-and, attests the author, citing her own experience, even in the present. In her debut book, sociology doctoral candidate Tubbs, a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar, offers informative, admiring biographical portraits of Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin, women who shaped the lives and work of their sons Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. A welcome biography of three noted civil rights icons who were indelibly influenced by their mothers.
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