Three mothers who shaped American history

This message comes from Mint Mobile. Starting at $15 a month, make the switch at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 upfront payment for three months. Five gigabyte plan equivalent to $15 a month. Taxes and fees extra. First three months only. See terms. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you We truly have to ask ourself, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, one of my favorite conversations with sociologist and author Anna Malaika Tubbs. Last year, she released her bestseller, Erased, where she examines why women's contributions to American history have been erased. I interviewed her back in 2022 about her first book, which is called The Three Mothers. It seems to me that the only thing that the mother can do, the Negro mother, is to try from the beginning to instill in the child a sense of somebody ness. You may recognize this as the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. This was what my mother tried to do. She made it very clear that in spite of these conditions, you are as good as anybody else, and, you you must not feel that you are not. And, In this clip from a 1961 interview, he's talking about one of the most influential people in his life, his mother, Alberta King. But most of us know little about her or have even heard of her. Yeah. It reminds me of the many different times, actually, that MLK Jr. Gave credit to his mother, but that scholars and journalists often ignored, and where he really believed that she was one of his primary inspirations in understanding, you know, the history of slavery, the history of, the Civil War, the history of people telling Black people that they were not worthy of their humanity. Anna spent years researching these three mothers, Alberta King, Louise Little and Bertis Baldwin, women who shaped American history yet whose stories are seldom told. Every year around January 15, the world rightfully celebrates the birth of the great Martin Luther King Jr. Here's Anna Malaika Tubbs on the TED stage. Yet virtually no one has stopped to consider who else was in that room that day in 1929. As if somehow MLK Jr birthed himself. I toured the location where he was born, a charming, quaint two story home in Atlanta. And while it was an honor to even be there, I left feeling frustrated by the tour guide script. Of course, MLK Jr. Was the center of most of the …