Our Mission
Our Founder
Who is Ambreia Meadows-Fernandez?
Ambreia Meadows-Fernandez is an award-winning storyteller, motherhood scholar, and intuitive motherhood coach who has written hundreds of articles for national and international publications, including Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Guardian.
She's also the founder of FBM Collective and its related initiatives, including FreeBlackmotherhood, a virtual community with over 20,000 followers that encourages 'Black mothers and others' to pursue the same freedom they want for their children.
She enjoys reading romance novels, laughing at her family's cheesy jokes, and reminding Black mothers and others that they deserve motherhood rooted in their values, not someone else's.
Countless Black mothers do what they can to raise free Black children, but still, the status of the child follows the mother.
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Free Black Motherhood (FMB) describes the journey—coined by motherhood scholar, award-winning storyteller, and coach Ambreia Meadows-Fernandez— that encourages Black mothers to prioritize the same freedom for themselves that they want for their children.
It's a multi-generational liberatory perspective that encourages mothers to see their mothers and children as co-conspirators on the path for family healing.
As we encourage Black mothers to ask "why and who says" they are able to re-frame motherhood and mothering on their own terms and seek to craft opportunities that bring ease and resist the pressure of patriarchal motherhood and systemic injustice.
FBM says, "if we free ourselves, the children will follow which is a nod to partus sequitur ventrum, which says that which is born follows the womb, noting that children with enslaved mothers inherit slavery.
FBM is a direct challenge to the historical narratives that sought to deny Black mothers of motherhood.
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FreeBlackmotherhood was first conceptualized when I saw examples of liberated mothering at a conference in 2019.
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But it was nourished and finetuned during my graduate school studies when I learned of Partus sequitur ventrem, an English legal doctrine passed in 1662 that loosely translates to “the status of the child follows the mother.”
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Under this system, White women would consistently birth and mother free children.
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Black and white men could father free or enslaved children based on the mother’s status.
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Comparatively, Black women were robbed of motherhood. Their wombs became a queue for human capital. There was a precarity of freedom and the looming threat of racial violence and terror, even for those who weren’t enslaved.
Though much has changed, efforts to deny the humanity of Black mothers, infants, and families continue.
