Today historian Tanisha Ford will join us to talk about her biography of Mollie Moon, who was one of the most influential women of the civil rights era. She was president of the fundraising arm of the National Urban League. The book, titled Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement illuminates an overlooked aspect of the civil rights era—the powerhouse fundraising effort that supported the movement—the luncheons, galas, cabarets, and traveling exhibitions attended by middle-class and working-class Black families, the Negro press, and titans of industry, including Winthrop Rockefeller.
Tanisha C. Ford is a writer, researcher, and cultural critic working at the intersection of politics and culture. She has forged an international reputation for her groundbreaking research on the history of Black style/fashion and social movements. She was honored as one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans. Tanisha Ford is currently a professor of history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches courses on African American and African diaspora history, biography and memoir, and the geopolitics of fashion. She lives in Harlem.
