Nikki Giovanni wrote “Mothers” in 1972. At the time, she was already a vocal and prolific member of the Black Arts Movement—a cultural movement inspired and promoted in the mid-1960s through the 1970s by artists including Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and others. The movement aimed to forefront African American cultural identity and uplift and promote Afrocentric community and art including music, literature, drama, and visual art. The movement grew concurrent with, on the heels of, and prior to the assassinations of Malcom X, activist Jimmy Lee Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

By 1972, Nikki Giovanni had published collections including Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgement (1968), and Re: Creation (1970). Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa,” published in Black Judgment, was widely anthologized, and contributed to Giovanni’s status as a major poet in what was referred to as the Black Renaissance. Giovanni appeared in televised and published conversation with writers such as James Baldwin and Margaret Walker, and was a sought-after speaker at events and universities. Giovanni’s early work embraces what some critics called a “militant” tone, but which Giovanni personally refers to as good poetry. Early work explores issues of race and gender both within the Black community and under pressures from a white-dominated culture. Consider “A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails,” in Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement (1968, 1970): “So let us work / for our day of Presence / When Stokely is in / The Black House / And all will be right with / Our World.” While the poem mentions Stokely Carmichael—a leader of the Civil Rights Movement—it also brings up gendered images of “the mini-skirt / Rebellion,” and a speaker in a “house full of panthers.”

“Mothers” appears at a transitional moment in Giovanni’s career, not in direction or focus, but in the expansion of her audience to include children. In 1971, Giovanni was nominated for the National Book Award for Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet. Three years earlier, she’d given birth to her son. At this time, she began to create literature for children—poems and stories that focus on Black history and issues of importance to Black youth.

As a speaker, a university professor, an editor, and an artist, Giovanni varies the vehicle but never the message, adhering to the values of her upbringing in the mid-20th century, speaking out for Black culture and identity through the Civil Rights Movement, and promoting notions of love, hope, and righteousness through a politically and socially active life.