By Lucien Baskin
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies is a free public education series hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In connection with the online event Malcolm X at 100 on Thursday, September 4th, 2025, Lucien Bask interviewed three of the guest speakers: Erik S. McDuffie, author of The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the U.S. Heartland, and Global Black Freedom, Patrick Parr, author of Malcolm Before X, and Anna Malaika Tubbs, author of The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write your recent books?
Erik McDuffie (EM): My diasporic midwestern roots led me to write The Second Battle for Africa. I am a proud sixth-generation African American Midwesterner. My family has lived in the region that we now call the Midwest since at least the 1830s. I was born in Detroit where my maternal grandparents resided. Growing up in suburban Cleveland, I learned from an early age that my grandfather hailed from a prominent Black Detroit family of abolitionists, preachers, and civic leaders. My maternal grandmother was born and raised in Toronto. Her grandmother hailed from St. Kitts. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in Detroit and Canada. My folks purchased a vacation home in Puerto Rico when I was young. The automobile industry was central to my life. My grandfather and practically everyone he knew worked for globally connected auto-related industries. My South Carolina-born father worked for a Detroit-based automobile supply company. Both of my parents were actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement at the local level with my mother and her siblings all participating in the 1963 Walk to Freedom in Detroit. So, the idea that the Midwest is some backward, insular, parochial, conservative, lily-white space makes no sense to me. My book, then, seeks to highlight the region’s global importance and transnational connections through Garveyism.
Patrick Parr (PP): Back in 2012, I went to a public library in Washington State with my mind set on analyzing the lives of historical figures at the age of 22. This is when I feel most people are at an intersection to their identity and purpose. I ended up making a list of 40 historical figures and wrote profiles for each of them. But for Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, I noticed there was not a whole lot of primary source material for this time in their life. To be honest, it was even hard to finish a portrait back then. In Malcolm’s case, I’d first read his autobiography in college and had always loved the prison chapters. But I’d always wanted more context, more historical detail about those six and a half years. The past two award-winning Malcolm X bios are great reads and certainly valuable, but I felt a book-length treatment of Malcolm’s six and a half years in prison was necessary.
Anna Malaika Tubbs (AMT): I was motivated by the glaring erasure of Black women in our histories of the civil rights movement. We praise men like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin without acknowledging the women who raised them. I wanted to show that Louise Little, Alberta King, and Berdis Baldwin were not supporting players but foundational figures in their own right. The phrase often repeated, “behind every great man is a great woman,” always struck me as wrong. In truth, before every great man is a great woman, and I wanted to bring these mothers’ legacies to the forefront.
The project became even more personal when I found out I was pregnant with my first child. As I studied their resilience, hopes, and fears, I was also entering motherhood myself. Their stories reminded me that Black mothers have always been extraordinary sources of strength in the face of systems built to erase them.
CBFS: How do your books shift our understanding of Malcolm’s life, legacy, and role in the movement?
EM: Second Battle for Africa demonstrates the centrality of the Diasporic Midwest, Garveyism, and Louise Norton Langdon Little, best known as the mother of Malcolm X, to shaping his life and worldview. Malcolm was a Midwesterner. He deeply admired the Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. The public and even some scholars often overlook these facts. Malcolm was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Lansing, Michigan. He rose to international prominence through the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930 in Detroit and later based in Chicago. My book traces the impact of the Midwest and Garveyism on him through his father, Earl Little of Georgia, and especially his mother, Louise Little. Born on the Caribbean island of Grenada, she was a brilliant, multi-lingual, grassroots Garveyite activist. Her maternal grandparents apparently were from Nigeria and were Muslim and Yoruba. Through coming of age in a tight-knit family in Grenada and through living in Montreal, Omaha, she cultivated in her eight children, including her most famous child, a Black radical internationalist sensibility committed to self-love, pride, self-reliance, and self-determination. Malcolm never forgot the Garveyite lessons he learned from his mother and through growing up in the U.S. heartland. Plus, his encounters with Midwest-based Black nationalist formations and thinkers, informed by Garvey, impacted Malcolm. My book, then, requires us to appreciate the importance of the Diasporic Midwest, Garveyism, and Louise Little to the making and legacy of Malcolm.
PP: I don’t want to sound like I am trying to shift a reader’s understanding. That’s too strong. I’d be more comfortable with ‘enhance’. As I wrote the prison chapters, I wanted to see and follow Malcolm through these years as clearly and accurately as possible. If the sources I discovered allowed me to follow him almost day-to-day, as I was able to do for some stretch at Norfolk Prison Colony, then I’d do it. I wanted to know who was around him, what topics he argued while on the debate team, what books he read, what systems were in place, what problems, from small (needing a new fountain pen from Ella) to large (challenging authority and requesting cells facing Mecca), did he face? I wanted to know inside and out the three prisons he endured, so much so that the reader can feel like they are inside with him as he struggles to find purpose and direction. After I finished the book, I re-revisited the speeches he’d give later in life. I hear often the sources he discovered in prison, the etymology he was fascinated by while looking through the dictionary, his speaking style. In this way, I understand him far more than I did before.
AMT: Malcolm X is often portrayed as if he only became educated when he joined the Nation of Islam, but that framing erases the crucial role of his mother, Louise Little. She was a Garveyite, Pan-Africanist, and activist who instilled in him pride, independence, and an international vision. Recognizing her influence reframes Malcolm’s life, not as the story of the reformed Detroit Red but as one rooted in a lineage of resistance and resilience he had to return to after his mother and father were taken from him.
When institutions dismissed Louise and erased her, they also obscured the origins of Malcolm’s political consciousness. Restoring her story allows us to see that the strength, clarity, and defiance Malcolm carried into the movement came directly from his mother’s example.
CBFS: Why does Malcolm X remain such a powerful source of inspiration for so many people and movements a century after his birth?
EM: Malcolm remains such a powerful source of inspiration because of his ability to speak truth to power and to his unapologetic call for global Black liberation. His message is more important now than ever given the fascist turn in the United States, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and upheavals across the African world and beyond.
PP: Malcolm hits different with a wide range of people, not just Black Americans. His Wikipedia page is translated into 96 different languages, last I checked. I buried a very a personal story in the Acknowledgements showing how Malcolm’s story and his relentless drive inspired me to ‘be better.’ I think those two words are what his eyes say the moment you see him in the first time: Be better. Stop making excuses, improve from within; you are better than the way you treat yourself. As I learned while writing the book, there were so many moments while incarcerated when Malcolm could have just given up and let the shadows swallow him, but he refused. He pushed through despite having nothing, and I mean no-thing. Entering a decrepit, 150-year-old prison, he’d felt profoundly ashamed of the man he’d turned into, and instead of making rope, he opened a book.
AMT: Malcolm continues to inspire because he embodied radical truth, courage, and transformation. He named injustice without compromise and lived out the possibility of growth, whether in his evolving views on race and gender or his embrace of global solidarity. That combination of honesty and willingness to change makes him timeless.
His mother’s lessons—of dignity, pride, and refusal to accept marginalization—formed the foundation for that courage. Today, as movements still confront injustice, Malcolm’s life reminds us that liberation requires uncompromising honesty, bravery, and a vision beyond the inequities we are being offered.
AUTHOR BIOS
Erik S. McDuffie is Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research and teaching interests include Black feminism, Black movements, Black internationalism, Black queer theory, urban history, the Midwest, and Global Africa. He is the author of The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the U.S. Heartland, and Global Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024). The book won the 2024 Jon Gjerde Prize, presented by the Midwestern History Association. His first book Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) won the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. He is also the author of several scholarly articles and essays published in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal; African Identities; American Communist History; Biography; Journal of African American History; Journal of West African History; Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International Women of Color; Radical History Review; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; and Women, Families, and Children of Color, among other journals and edited volumes. Originally from Detroit, McDuffie is a sixth-generation Midwesterner, whose family hails from the United States, Canada, and St. Kitts.
Patrick Parr is the author of three books, most recently “Malcolm Before X,” which Kirkus Reviews praised as being “the definitive story of Malcolm’s youth and early adulthood.” He is also the author of One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation and The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.Parr’s work has appeared in The American Prospect, Japan Today and The Atlantic, among others. He lives with his wife near Tokyo and teaches writing at Lakeland University Japan.
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Master’s in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelor’s in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University, Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear and engaging.
Her articles have been published by TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, CNN, The Guardian, Newsweek and others. Her first book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation came out in 2021. In addition to becoming a NYT Bestseller, The Three Mothers was a NYT Editors’ Choice and an Amazon Editor’s Pick, among other accolades. Her second book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us came out in May of this year and was an instant NYT Bestseller and an instant USA Today Bestseller, it is also an Amazon Editor’s Pick and an Amazon Best Book of the Year So Far. Additionally, Anna’s storytelling takes form in her talks, including her TED Talk that has been viewed 2 million times, as well as the scripted and unscripted screen projects she has in development. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids.