Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Vennas and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by writer and scholar Anna Malika Tubbs, where I ask her, how can we honor Black Motherhood?

Welcome to Getting Curious, this is Jonathan Vennas. I'm so excited to interview our guest this week. She is an author.

She is also, you know, I've been staying for years on this podcast. I love like a PhD moment. I can't help it.

You are a PhD candidate at Cambridge, which just sounds so fancy, honey. You're a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge scholar.

She's also an educator on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And she's spent the last four years as the first partner of Stockton, California.

Her new book, The Three Mother's, tells the story of the women who raised Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

So you have written such an incredible book. It's coming out this week.

And everyone I just had to tell you that we're on Zoom right now and I did just give Anna a quote and quote,

because it's actually coming out in a couple of weeks. And this is really like a few weeks from the past. But this book is so incredible. And actually right before we jumped on, I learned something about this that I think I want you to share.

But so I just blown away to learn that this is the first time that these three prolific women have been profiled. How did this idea come to you? How did you start to approach it? Wow.

Yeah, it is a surprise that these women have not put together. It's definitely a symbol of the fact that they have been erased through history.

To my benefit, sure that I'm the first person to do this, but it definitely is also quite sad and disheartening that many haven't thought of these women before.

So my idea came from starting my PhD wanting to join other scholars who were correcting this erasure, this crime of erasing black women from history.

And making sure that we tell their stories, whether that was, you know, Margulie Shatterley with hidden figures and several other black feminist scholars who were saying enough is enough.

We're going to tell these stories. We're going to set the history record straight. And so with these three mothers, that's exactly what I wanted to do. My idea of starting with three famous men was one because it's kind of like a hook and kind of a trick because so many people love these men and they definitely should.

They're going to take away any credit from the men and their work. But to say there is a lot more happening around them. They aren't these unicorns that popped out of nowhere.

They aren't these men that we to celebrate, you know, the fact that they were born as if that's something they did on their own.

But they're men who had communities around them. They're men who had families around them and who quite often gave credit to the women in their lives.

They're going to talk about their mothers all the time, but it was more a crime that scholars and historians had erased these narratives and kept us from knowing these three incredible women stories.

So as soon as I started looking into them, I was immediately enthralled. And the story just wrote itself from there.

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