Mollie Moon

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In the histories of the Civil Rights Movement, we don't often center the fundraisers, often Black women, whose tireless efforts made the movement possible. Today, we're telling the story of one such fundraiser, Mollie Moon. Mollie Virgil Lewis was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1907. When Mollie was just a baby, her teenage mother, Beulah Rogers Lewis, left Mississippi and her broken marriage, bringing Mollie with her to Cleveland, Ohio, where they lived with Beulah's sister and her family until Beulah remarried, and they moved to Gary, Indiana. When Mollie was high school aged Beulah moved them back to Mississippi, so that Mollie could attend Rust College Secondary School. After graduating, Mollie attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, where she studied pharmacy, graduating in 1928, with the expectation that she would join the Black middle class. Mollie married pharmacist, Cleve Blanchett, and they built a respectable life in New Orleans. But Mollie was deeply unhappy, and they soon divorced. In 1930, Mollie made the momentous decision to move to New York City, where she befriended figures of the Harlem Renaissance, like Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. A couple of years later, activist Louise Thompson recruited Mollie and some 20 other of her friends to travel to Moscow to star in a propaganda film supported by the Communist Party USA. Called, "Black and White," the film aimed to show the horrible conditions of Jim Crow segregation in the United States. The film was never made, but the trip to the USSR expanded Mollie's views on class and labor, and strengthened her resolve to join the movement for racial equality. Mollie stayed in Europe, working as a hostess at a Berlin cabaret, and taking German classes, before finally returning to the United States, in late 1933. Mollie enrolled in the master's program at Columbia University's Teachers program, but an intended short visit to see her mom and stepfather in Gary, ended up with Mollie moving there for three years, where she briefly married a man named Eugene. By late 1937, Mollie was back in New York, her second marriage having essentially ended, although she wasn't yet officially divorced. It was after she returned to New York, that Mollie started dating Henry Lee Moon, a fellow activist with whom she had stayed in regular correspondence, since they had both traveled to Moscow. Mollie was working as a social worker with the New York City Department of Welfare's civil services. So when Henry landed a job in Washington DC, with the United States Housing Authority, an agency within the Department of the Interior, their relationship became a long distance one. It stayed that way, even after they married on August 13, 1938. In June of 1940, Mollie hosted her first fundraiser, a cabaret dansant for the Harlem Community Art Center, which had originally been funded by the Works Progress Administration, but which needed additional funds to move into a larger space. In February, 1941, Molly hosted the first of what would become her annual signature event, The Beaux Arts Balls, held then at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Unfortunately, with the loss of WPA funding in 1942, the Harlem Community Art Center closed. One of Mollie's good friends, and a member of the Harlem Community Art Center sponsoring committee, Lester Granger, was appointed Executive Director of the National Urban League in 1942. The National Urban League, headquartered in New York City, was founded in 1910, to improve the lives of African Americans in cities. Granger asked Mollie to create a new arm of the National Urban League, both to recruit new members and to raise badly needed funds. Mollie responded by forming the National Urban League Guild, "an interracial volunteer club of young professional people." With the inaugural New York City guild growing to 58 members in less than a year, Mollie's famed Beaux Arts Ball became an annual guild fundraiser. In 1948, Henry published his first book, "Balance of Power: The Negro Vote." By this point, he had also become director of publicity for the NAACP, allowing him to move full time to New York to be with Mollie, and for the two to welcome their daughter, Mollie Lee Moon. That summer, Mollie convinced her friend, philanthropist, Winthrop Rockefeller, to allow her to host an interracial Urban League party at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. As Mollie told The New York Times, "Nobody was going to buck the landlord. That's how we broke the color barrier." After Mollie had launched the National Urban League Guild in New York City, additional chapters popped up around the country, some initiated by Mollie, and others begun more locally. In 1952, the loose organization formalized as the National Council of Urban League Guilds, with Mollie as its first chairwoman. In 1961, Lester Granger retired, and Whitney Young took over as Executive Director of the National Urban League. Young had a particular vision for the direction of the National Urban League, and Mollie didn't fit that vision. Among his first moves, was to remove Mollie from her position as the National Urban League Executive Secretary, and to rotate her off the Board of Trustees, although she continued to lead the guild. The National Urban League finally honored Mollie with the recognition she deserved by creating the Mollie Moon Volunteer Service Award in 1989. At the inaugural ceremony, Mollie noted that the guild had given the National Urban League, "over a period of years, a million dollars free and unrestricted." Others took notice of Mollie's efforts too, and later that year, New York Mayor David Dinkins presented Mollie with the President's Volunteer Action Award on behalf of President George HW Bush. Mollie died on Long Island on June 22, 1990, survived by her daughter and five grandchildren. Joining me now to discuss Mollie Moon, is Dr. Tanisha C. Ford, professor of history in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and the author of, "Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon, and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement."

Hi Tanisha. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  10:13  
Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Kelly  10:15  
Yes, I was so excited to learn about Mollie Moon. I had never heard of her before. I want to understand a little bit about how you got started. I know you were working on this book for a while before it was published. How did you learn about Mollie Moon? How did you start getting interested in writing about her?

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  10:33  
I was a dissertator actually, and I was doing research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, when I stumbled upon her name. I wasn't looking for her because like you I had never heard of her. But once I started to piece together elements of her life through news stories, I realized this is a woman I want to write about. I think she's fascinating. I loved reading about the events that she hosted in Harlem in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but once I started to dig around in her personal papers, which were also housed at the Schomburg, I realized that there's a much deeper story here about politics, about race, about fundraising, and how we fundraise for racial justice. And that's when I knew I was onto something that, unfortunately, is understudied. So that initial idea I had as a as a dissertater, proved to be true, a good book topic, at least in my opinion.

Kelly  11:31  
Yeah, understudied and really timely.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  11:35  
I think so, especially with the election cycle next year. These are the kinds of questions that we need to be thinking about, you know, as Americans as a voting public, to think about how democracy is funded.

Kelly  11:50  
Yeah. So I'm going to come back to that piece. But first, I'm gonna ask a little bit about the sources for the book. So you just mentioned looking at her personal papers, I think you did some oral history, I want to hear a little bit about kind of what what your sources were for this book. And there it sort of weaves between a biography of Mollie Moon, but then also the larger history surrounding what's happening with the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  12:15  
You know, I'm trained as a historian, 20th century US history, to be more precise, and we are definitely interested in questions of the archive. So what can historic documents teach us about the past? We're always trying to find new ways to use those documents, and then ways to tell American history, to rethink periodization, to ask how things have changed over time. So with that said, we often go to manuscript collection. So in the case of Mollie Moon, there was a lot of personal correspondence, her employment records, her marriage licenses and certificates, educational records, other documents like personal documents, family photos, keepsakes, and so forth. So I had all of that manuscript collection material, but then I was also looking at things on the financial side; so records for organizations like the National Urban League, their financial records, their tax documents, the same as the major philanthropic foundations I was studying, like the Taconic Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. All of these organizations have their own records. So I was able to use those and in many ways, read them against the grain to find this under studied history about fundraising for the movement. And then I took those things and put them in conversation with less common objects and documents for historians like menus. So Mollie Moon hosted tons of events. I tried to track down those hotel menus. I wanted to understand like what kind of food they would have been serving at these events. I wanted to know more about how the rooms and spaces were decorated. So I did a lot of that work to fill in the blanks. Fortunately, a hotel like the Waldorf Astoria has an archive. They have holdings, so you could learn more about that hotel and the history of that hotel. And then I just did more ethnographic and geographic related research. So as you mentioned, interviewing people who are still living to really map their own oral history, their own narrative, their personal narratives, their experiences with Mollie Moon, or the people who didn't know her, the kind of work they're doing today. And then I also had the benefit of living in Harlem, which meant I was able to move around Harlem and make a physical map of the spaces where Mollie Moon lived, where she hosted events. I could walk those spaces, I could see what it would feel like to walk that space that she lived and worked in in the 1950s.

Kelly  15:03  
So Mollie Moon has almost two separate lives. She has has like the the life before this life that we're talking about where she is married twice, she trains to work in a pharmacy, like she's this, you know, totally different thing than sort of the second half of her life and when she starts fundraising and getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement. So could you talk a little bit about that the the shift, it's easy to think of as the when she goes to Moscow, but it seems like it starts to happen a little bit before that. But so could you talk about that? But then also the things that remain, like she obviously is still the same person. It's not like a totally different thing.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  15:42  
Yeah, so she is born into a very working class family of parents who are young, young parents, not so much by early 20th century standards, but for sure, by today's standards. They would have had her as a teenager. They were big believers in education. Mollie Moon went off to college to earn a degree in pharmacy from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. And the expectation, I believe, from her and from her family was that she would then join the Black middle class, like that, that would be the dream. You know, she marries her first husband, who was a pharmacist, and they're living this Black bourgeois life in New Orleans. She becomes disenchanted with that life and with that relationship, and after a very nasty divorce, she moves to Harlem, where she joins a community, a community of poets, intellectuals, visual artists, writers, novelists, and so forth. And it's through the those connections with people like Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, Augusta Savage and so forth that she really begins to rethink her politics and her politics become far more left leaning. That group, especially Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson, and others go off to Moscow, where they are charged with making a racial propaganda film about the horrors of Jim Crow segregation in the United States and the impact of labor exploitation across the US South. The film is never made, but Mollie is forever changed by this experience, not only in that she's there with some of her closest friends and her future husband is also on this trip. Henry Lee Moon was a popular journalist at the time. She gets to travel abroad for perhaps the first time in her life. She's at this this place that you know, at this point, the USSR is a nascent nation state. And you know, they aren't treated in the same ways as they would be in the United States. Even as African Americans in Moscow, they can move rather freely, they are embraced as comrades. And just seeing the possibilities of a free Black life, really informs Mollie's thinking. She also becomes really committed to working with and for the proletariat, the Black proletariat. So when she comes back from Moscow in the early 1930s, after a stint in Berlin, she is dedicated to the movement for racial equality and economic justice more specifically. So some of her first initiatives are working alongside that Black radical left. So she's working with people, some of whom would have called themselves communists, some of whom call themselves socialists. She's never formally affiliated with the Communist Party USA, but she does espouse a lot of their beliefs around socialism. And these things come to bear in some of her early activism and organizing and fundraising work for centers like the Harlem Community Art Center. Things began to shift in the 1940s, just as the US entered World War II, because she has been charged by her good friend and fellow social worker, Lester Granger, with starting this branch of the National Urban League, which now Granger is the head. That is a fundraising and volunteer arm and she names this the National Urban League Guild. And once she establishes this body and begins working very closely with the National Urban League, as you suggest, her politics at least public facing politics seem to shift because of course, the league is this major civil rights organization. And they have ties to local state and national government. They work very closely with leaders of industry, with philanthropic, major philanthropic foundation heads and managers. So her profile expands and she's now working alongside people with varying social politics with you know, capital P politics that's different from hers, and also, who might be religious conservatives even right. So she is then charged with kind of changing her message to a certain extent, although she remains a very progressive thinker. And so that's one thing that I wanted to make clear in the book that, yes, things start to shift, she becomes more glamorous, and people see her they and they link her to glamour because of her annual Beaux Arts Ball. But her core politics are still rather progressive. But what happens is that the the political landscape within the larger Black Freedom Movement or Civil Rights Movement, begins to shift. And these people who were once seen as radical of Mollie's generation are now criticized for being accommodationist, for being moderate. So I really wanted to map that shift in the political landscape.

Kelly  20:51  
And that leads us into this tension about where the money comes from. So civil rights organizing is pretty expensive. You can't just do it for free. So I want to talk a little bit about where all this money goes, why it's important to be raising all this money. And then this tension between should you be taking money from rich white people and catering to what they think the movement should look like? But they're the ones with the money. Who should be donating to this movement? Where should this come from? So I wonder if you could talk through that? 

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  21:25  
Yeah. So there's a lot buried in that, that question. The first part of this is that the United States is built on a slave economy. African Americans were forcibly brought to this country, of course, and had no rights. They had no civic or human rights. They were seen as chattel property, movable property. So in order to create the kind of democratic world that African Americans felt they deserved to live in, as US citizens, they were then charged with funding that world, right. So if we want to end mass poverty, because African Americans are disproportionately living in poverty in the time period that my book is set, and arguably, even so today, if that's the case, if we don't have equal access to voting, if we don't have equal access to public facilities, I mean, because a lot of Mollie Moon's early organizing is when Jim Crow is still the law of the land. So if we want to live in a different world, they found themselves having to fund the bill for that. So that means we have to do voter registration drives, voter education drives. You know, they were doing things like freedom rides, which of course come later, but also freedom schools and school after school programs, breakfast programs, I mean, all those things cost money. And we don't like to put a price tag on that, because oftentimes, it's it's that we see social movements as erupting organically from demands from the grassroots. We just don't want to think that it costs money, especially if you are a minoritarian citizen in this country, it costs money to be free, right. And that's a kind of, it seems a seeming contradiction of terms that many Americans don't want to have to face. But people like Mollie Moon were keenly aware of the cost of the movement. So they were charged with raising funds to support these kinds of initiatives. Now, as you mentioned, the trouble becomes: African Americans, because during the time of the book, majority of African Americans were living at or below the poverty line, it means that even though they were well intentioned, and that according to class, historically, African Americans have out-given people of the same social class of different races, that being what it is, they still couldn't raise enough money on their own to support these initiatives, as the Civil Rights Movement expanded in the 1950s, on the other side of the Brown v. Board of Education decision which outlawed racial segregation in the United States. And especially as we move into the 1960s, with the onset of these major sit-in movements across the country, there was just more money required, you know, to fund these types of initiatives. So, the National Urban League, who had long been doing work alongside and procuring funds from major philanthropic foundations and corporations, dug even deeper into those coffers. And the money that they started to receive was really in the millions every year. And then as the 1960s progressed, you know, when LBJ is president and then Nixon is president, I mean, they're even receiving federal funds to support these organizations and their causes. So that raised a lot of tensions within the Black community about whether or not they should be taking money from these sources, because of this thing that political scientist, Megan Francis terms, "movement capture," or the idea that the people who are bankrolling the movement will steer it towards causes that they think, are worthy. And those causes tend to not be the things that are most pressing in Black communities, and they tend to be more moderate in terms of their impact, and the demands that they're making. So voter registration was a major one that, you know, organizations like the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation, were willing to support. Youth programs, the Rockefellers and others really love supporting Black youth programs, you know, this idea of taking the Black street urchin like taking them off the street and reforming him, you know, like that was the undergirding message there in those youth programs. But what about ending mass poverty? You know, what about the housing crisis? What about even the operating funds required for an organization like the National Urban League to do its work? I mean, it needed a staff to carry out these initiatives, those funds tended to not go toward operational funds. So there are just all these tensions and debates in the book, I just tried to capture those debates, so that we can see why people were so concerned with co-optation of the movement.

Kelly  26:34  
Yeah, it's fascinating, and I think will be very familiar to anyone who has done anything in the political organizing space. A lot of a lot of things that still resonate. So you mentioned  her Beaux Arts Ball, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. It's her signature event that goes on for many, many years. And the way that Mollie tried to use that particular event to keep being accessible to the African Americans who would benefit from it, not just the wealthy white people.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  27:09  
Yeah, so the Beaux Arts Ball was her signature fundraiser. The Beaux Arts Ball, she initially launches it when she's fundraising for the Harlem Community Art Center in the early 1940s. So it predates her National Urban League Guild. And this is a ball that she started to raise funds for this local community art center, which was a beloved center that trained up a generation of Black artists who were taught by some of the most, you know, important artists of the 20th century, so people like Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Knight, Augusta Savage, I mean, all these people are on the faculty and they're training people like Jacob Lawrence, for example, right? So this is just a major artistic center in Harlem. She hosts this Beaux Arts Ball because she understands that in order to try to save this center, they need to bring in bigger dollars. And in order to bring in the bigger dollars, you have to have grander events. What I love about the the Beaux Arts Ball, is that is a costumed affair. And it really draws inspiration from West Indian carnival. And so this idea that the costumes become the great equalizer, that people can wear the costumes as a way to kind of break down class and racial hierarchies. I also love that it draws from the drag ball scene. So Hamilton Lodge, for example, held an annual drag ball which was really popular in the 1920s and 30s. And so just that outlandish, ostentatious nature of drag balls was definitely part of the culture of the early Beaux Arts Balls. And these balls were very intentionally held in Harlem, initially at the Savoy Ballroom. After the Savoy is forced to close, Mollie moves it to a venue in the Bronx. And then she has to end up moving it down to the Waldorf Astoria. Now this happens for a couple reasons. One is because the nature of the ball is is becoming it's becoming so important to the National Urban League that some of their largest donors are there. Politicians know that they need to come to this event in order to shake hands with their Black constituents. So it just becomes a star studded affair and so it needs more space and it needs to be grander in scale. Also, Mollie had, in the late 1940s, hosted this event, alongside Winthrop Rockefeller at the Rockefellers Rainbow Room, and they were credited with busting the color line in New York City by inviting African Americans to party in the grand space of the Rainbow Room. So because she had already broken that color line down, then people thought the next step would be to integrate one of the major hotels in New York City. And she does just that. Now some people see this as racial progress. Other people saw it as Mollie Moon, ending or reimagining her connection to the Black community, right where this used to be seen as a Black event, and now it felt more like an interracial event. It felt more like an extension of the politics of the National Urban League. And some people felt like that was problematic. I found articles in the Black press where some journalists were, you know, applauding Mollie Moon for this move, and other people were saying like, "Oh, we lost the spirit of the ball." Those early balls, as I said, that drew from that, you know, West Indian carnival culture, drag ball culture like that, it started to shift and become a little bit more corporate in nature, where people stopped wearing costumes, and they started wearing tuxedos and ball gowns and diamonds and furs. So it just became the epitome of glamour and less about this, you know, more grassroots, costumed fun, and I love just being able to trace the ball over the year and how it shifted.

Kelly  31:14  
So you've written a lot about fashion. Of course, Mollie uses fashion. She loves fashion, but she also uses it very deliberately. Could you talk a little bit about that? And one of the great things about your book is all the pictures that you're able to include, which really highlights this aspect.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  31:32  
Mollie Moon herself was indeed a fashion plate. And I was tickled when I read in her personal correspondence about how she would max out her charge limits at various department stores, trying to buy the latest in fashion. She definitely saw herself as a society woman. And even though a lot of women of her generation were moving away from the kind of ostentatious glam of the earlier Gilded Age, they still had a responsibility or they felt like they had a responsibility to show up at events decked out, right, in all the finest wear. So she definitely was invested in that mode. And the other piece of this is that as a fundraiser, you know, you're always looking for the next best thing as it relates to fundraising. And that thing for Mollie Moon became the Ebony Fashion Fair. So Ebony Magazine and Johnson Publishing more broadly, would host an annual fundraising fashion show that traveled from city to city, and an organization could bring the fashion fair to their city, and it became a way for their particular audience, which tended to be predominantly African American, to get to see European couture up close. So you can see all of the latest European designers and it also became a place for Black designers to show off their wares for their predominantly Black clientele. So it was just this beautiful kind of space where you got to see you know, the European au couture, but Black au couture as well. So Mollie Moon brought that Ebony Fashion Fair to New York City in the early 1960s. And it too, became one of her signature events and just secured her status as the grande dame of of Harlem, somebody with her finger on the pulse, who had connections. She was good friends with the Johnsons. She worked very closely with them. She was often featured in Ebony and Jet Magazine, both Johnson publications. So it just showed her as a cultural insider, a fashion insider in ways that you know, we might think of people like Taraji P. Henson or Gabrielle Union, among others, today.

Kelly  34:01  
We need to talk about her marriage with Henry Lee Moon, which is just this incredible,they are like this power couple. It seems really supportive, even at times when people are, you know, trying to spread rumors that perhaps she's having an affair with Win Rockefeller. She and Henry are just this this rock together. They, they're able to accomplish so much. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about their relationship.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  34:30  
So Mollie and Henry, they met around 1930, around the time that Mollie moves to New York City and she's running around with Dorothy West, the wunderkind writer of the Harlem Renaissance. They're close in age where all of the other Harlem Renaissance writers are a bit older. They're more like Henry's age, so Henry's maybe like seven years older than them. And what's interesting is that Henry and Dot dated at one point, casually It seems, but they dated nonetheless. And I found evidence of this in Mollie and Dot's personal correspondence. So I thought that was also hilarious. So when they go on this trip to Moscow, Henry and Dot are no longer dating, and she's kind of on to her next conquest. Mollie and Henry don't seem to have spent a lot of time together. I've never heard mention of them hanging out. But sometime between when Mollie leaves Moscow to relocate to Berlin, and when she returns to New York City, around late 1933, early 1934, she and Henry have struck up a correspondence, and they've become good friends. And that friendship seems to develop into a romance unbeknownst to their friends and their their social circle. And so they're dating, even though Mollie is still legally married to her second husband. And that husband, it seemed like she just married him because she was sulking. She never thought that she was going to get to move back to New York City. And so she marries this guy. And you know, the marriage is really short lived in terms of, you know, their time actually spent together. So they become estranged, and she's just waiting on him to grant this divorce. So she and Henry strike up this romance, they even go as far as like, getting engaged, essentially, like they're planning a wedding. but she's still legally married, and none of their friends know. And so I think that in the quiet space of this courtship, that was a long distance courtship, they really form a very close friendship, and a very close intellectual and political bond. So they marry once Mollie is granted this divorce from her second husband, they marry in 1938. And they set about establishing themselves in Black society, in the world of Black politics. You know, Henry gets a job working in FDR's White House. He is a member of this informal Black cabinet alongside people like Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert Weaver. And Mollie has secured a job as a social worker with the New York Department of Welfare. So they have this commuter marriage for the first four years of their marriage before they are able to move together. Henry moves back to New York City, and they're living under one roof. And it's really around this time that they start to establish themselves as a political, social, social power couple. Mollie's working with the National Urban League, Henry goes on to become the publicity director of the NAACP, so they have major posts with the major civil rights organizations in the country. What I loved is, you know, I use the language power couple, of course, that wouldn't wouldn't have been the language that they would use today. But I think people could recognize this language. You know, this is the kind of language that you know, in the African American community we use to describe the power of Black love between two people who are of equal stature. So I wanted to use that language to explain to readers like what their coupling would have looked like and what it would have meant to the African American community to see a couple like Mollie and Henry. But what I loved most was just reading their love letters, they wrote each other incessantly. I mean, in the way that we write emails or send texts to one another today. I mean, they were constantly writing and sharing their, their daily experiences with one another, sharing things that they were reading, newspaper clippings, I mean, it was just really rich, and so I could just feel the love between them. But late in the process of writing this book, I was able to track down an interview that was finally made digital at the Schomburg that the esteemed historian David Levering Lewis, had conducted with Henry Moon primarily, but Mollie is also at a moment in the interview seated beside him. And so to be able to hear them speak to one another and hear how they interacted with one another. I just loved it. It just affirms so much about what I thought about their relationship and even speaking to other people who, who knew them. I mean, they were definitely a yin and yang that just complemented each other so well. And, you know, Molly said in her letter to Henry before they got married, like, if this third marriage doesn't work, it won't be, you know, any fault of my own, because I'm gonna for the first time in my life, I'm gonna commit to being a real wife, you know, and and so she she did. They stayed married until Henry passed away in the 1980s.

Kelly  39:30  
I love that. So I want to ask a slightly broader question, which is that you've been really involved in public history in a few different formats. You've written for popular publications, you've consulted with organizations. I wonder if you could just talk briefly about that, and about the, obviously I do a history podcast. So public history is important to me. But you know, like, why we should be thinking about the public facing piece of history. 

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  39:57  
As an academic historian, there's a way when we write books, we write to speak to one another, to engage in historiographical debates, to advance a field, or a set of questions that a field is concerned with, a set of documents or other primary material a field is concerned with. But what I love about public history is that it's really about what kind of stories do we tell ourselves as a public, so that could be a local community. It could be what a state tells its citizens about that state and its culture, its identity, what we tell ourselves about our identity as folks who reside in the USA, right? So public history helps to shape public discourse, it helps shape how we understand our origin story, how we understand where we've been, as a nation, how we grapple with complex issues, like democracy, like voting, like citizenship, and like, what does it mean to be a US citizen? And what kind of rights are you afforded with that status as a US national? So I wanted to make sure that I was engaging in those debates, and that I was creating work, not only scholarship, but also writing that appears in magazines and newspapers, that would help people think in new ways about our national story, about who we are, where we've been as a nation, in many ways to help people understand a lot of the fractious debates around things like critical race theory, and the way that has been, you know, deemed this dirty term, you know, some boogeyman that conservatives have used to attack Black Studies and Black intellectualism more broadly. So I want to, you know, try to show like, the historical roots of those things or like how we come to see ourselves as a nation that, you know, concerned with the public good, and the role of philanthropy, in defining what the public good is, and how, in many ways philanthropy has participated in the Black Freedom Project, but in all, in other ways, has stymied the Black Freedom Project. So then what do we mean when we say public good, and so I'm trying to advance a conversation around a critical philanthropy studies. I think that's the kind of work that Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation are trying to do present day as well. So, you know, using public history as a way to shape national discourse.

Kelly  42:29  
I very much appreciate it. So I want to encourage listeners now to go get their own copy of "Our Secret Society." Could you tell them how to get a copy? 

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  42:39  
Yes, it's available everywhere books are sold. But we do love supporting indie bookstores. So if you go to your favorite indie bookstore locally, you can order the book or buy it in store. You can also go to bookshop.org, which has the catalog of many independent bookstores, but also my website TanishaCFord.com, or OurSecretSocietybook.com. Both of those have buy links for the book, and on oursecretsociety.com, you can also find a reading guide. So if you want to read the book in a book club format, there's a reading guide and I also created a recipe book, an "Our Secret Society" recipe book that takes so many of the recipes I found Mollie Moon and other women of the National Urban League Guild used to compile and sell in these fundraiser cookbooks. I curated a bunch of different recipes. And so you can make the cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and main dishes that Mollie Moon would have served at her in home parties.

Kelly  43:45  
That's amazing. And I should note, I normally read ebooks. I normally prefer to read ebooks, but I'm glad I have a physical copy of this one because the pictures are so great.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  43:54  
Yes, I love the pictures. I worked very hard to get the permissions for all of those pictures.

Kelly  44:00  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about? 

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  44:04  
I just hope that readers enjoy this book. I tried to take all of the historical facts but make it read more like a novel than like, you know, historical tome so hopefully it's an enjoyable as well as educational read.

Kelly  44:20  
Well, I enjoyed it. I was stuck sitting waiting to see if I was gonna get called into jury duty in this, you know, sort of boring room and I at least had this to engage me so I really appreciated it. 

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  44:30  
Oh, thank you, Kelly.

Kelly  44:33  
 Tanisha thank you so much. This was a great conversation and I just loved learning about Mollie Moon.

Dr. Tanisha C. Ford  44:38  
Thank you my absolute pleasure. Happy holidays.

Kelly  44:42  
You too.

Teddy  45:09  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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