A Q&A with Black History Month keynote speaker, scholar Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs

Author and scholar Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs will be the featured speaker at Wayne State University's Black History Month program, Detroit History Is Black History III: A Courageous Conversation, on Feb. 26. The two-time New York Times best-selling author, whose work explores the intersection of history, sociology and gender, is best known for her book The Three Mothers, which examines the lives and influence of the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

Ahead of her visit, Tubbs spoke about why recovering overlooked histories matters, what audiences can expect from her talk and why Black History Month carries particular urgency today.

Q: How will your academic background and research inform your presentation at Wayne State?

Anna Malaika Tubbs: My undergrad is in anthropology. My master's is in gender studies. My Ph.D. is in sociology. My first book was about the mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

That's what I'll be talking about the most during the program. But I also just recently put out a book about patriarchy. It's called Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us. And they go in tandem because so many people who read the first book feel very surprised and shocked that it wasn't common knowledge that these three incredible men walked in the footsteps of their mothers … and that each of the mothers did what their sons later became famous for long before their sons were even a thought in their mind.

Q: Why is telling these women's stories essential to a fuller understanding of Black history?

Tubbs: We often reduce our telling of Black history to some moments where we say, for example, that slavery existed. Then we fast forward to the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s and say, 'Then MLK Jr. fought for our right to vote, and then everything was fine.' That's how a lot of people would summarize what Black Americans have been through in this nation.

But the reality is there's so much more that happens in between that. This book gives us a little bit more. It gives us a glimpse into the generation that raised leaders like MLK Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin. … It reminds us of this continuous fight against the forces that we've come up against as a Black community … It actually gives us a lot of hope and this feeling of responsibility to carry that forward as well.

Q: MLK, Malcolm X and James Baldwin have been studied for more than half a century. What more can we learn about them through the lens of their mothers?

Tubbs: It opens our minds to the complexity of their thought and their identity because it so often has been reduced in simplistic terms that do not fully celebrate what each man stood for. MLK Jr.'s mother was the daughter of the leaders of Ebenezer Baptist Church. She grows up believing that her faith is always intertwined with social justice, that you must fight for those who are oppressed if you're going to call yourself a religious leader, that there's no other way to do this. She grows up participating in marches and in boycotts. Her parents are some of the very first members of the NAACP. I'm basically describing her son.

With Berdis Baldwin, James Baldwin's mother, she was a writer, and she believed in the power of language to help people through the darkest times in their lives. She had experienced tragedy early on when her mother died. In that tragedy, she becomes somebody who thinks about how we move forward no matter how dark things can become. She gifts everybody these letters and her writing filled with knowledge on how we can fight for the light. Her son, when he becomes famous and says he's a witness to the power of light and he uses his writing to be that witness, he's not coming up with that out of nowhere. He's just directly quoting his mother.

With Louise Little, it's the fact that she - after learning from her grandparents that it is always better to fight for your freedom and to even die fighting for freedom than to live oppressed - wants to join this international movement for Black lives. She joins the Marcus Garvey movement and leaves Grenada. She goes to Montreal, Canada, on her own and becomes an organizer in the Marcus Garvey movement, where we clearly see ties to the Nation of Islam later. Even Malcolm X says that it wasn't that Elijah Muhammad was the first to teach him these things. He writes in a letter that his mother was the first to teach him these things.

It will completely transform how you're thinking about the three men.

Q: At a time when we're seeing challenges to civil rights and the erasure of African American history, why is Black History Month more important than ever?

Tubbs: What we're witnessing right now is this attempt by the group of people who want to continue to maintain an original social order fabricated by the founding fathers, desperately trying to reverse the progress of those who said, 'We will fight for a real democracy where we are all included.'

Erasure is a critical strategy in maintaining an unfair system because you have to keep people from knowing how people have fought back in the past. That's why Black History Month becomes so critical, especially this year. We have to maintain these stories. We have to fight back against the erasure. We need to make sure our kids are not growing up thinking this is the worst, but instead that we are equipped with the knowledge to fight and to make sure we are aware we've done it before. We are continuing to fight for an actual democracy.