Anna Malaika Tubbs, Ph.D., was expecting her first child while writing her debut book. The subject matter for The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation was excerpted from the biographies of the nation’s most consequential civil rights figures, highlighting their mothers as unsung influences on the ethos of their seminal sons. As a first-time mother-to-be, Tubbs brought the stakes of historical remembrance into intimate focus, contemplating motherhood’s expansiveness while preparing to enter that state herself.