The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

It’s so much succinct education, history, and perspective in one book. I think everyone should read it. Truly eye opening.

What an incredible piece of the puzzle that has been fleshed out; behind every great man is likely an even more incredible woman who labored in obscurity to bring about a more beautiful world. Black women especially have been at the bottom of the public appreciation totem pole; treat yourself to this richly deserved, long overdue tribute. My only comment is this; the author has remarkable and appropriate empathy for the husbands of two of the women featured, articulating the crippling context of oppression that contributed to their despair and rage and then violence towards their amazing wives and children. I'm with her there. But she's also quite clipped, for example, about Elizabeth Cady Stanton's appalling & racist statements during suffrage. Forgetting, perhaps, the context that Stanton was in - that she was a passionate abolitionist long before she was a feminist; yet when push came to shove, Frederick Douglass (sometimes an ally of women's rights) distanced himself from universal suffrage in favor of the following priorities; Black male suffrage first, temperance second, and female suffrage...last. I deeply feel Elizabeth Cady Stanton's outrage and grief over that betrayal, even if I condemn her statements in the aftermath. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a radically outside-the-box thinker, a powerhouse of courage and change. Absolutely everyone exists in a context that would break our hearts - in the best way - if we were willing to un-armor ourselves. And I do deeply appreciate how any person looking deeply into American history could choose to armor themselves.