“Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Cash, and Energy Behind the Civil Rights Motion” by Tanisha C. Ford
c.2023,
Amistad
$32.99
353 pages
The One % has all the things you don’t.
A elaborate home in a complicated place. Designer clothes, quick automobiles. Mates in excessive locations that know find out how to get issues executed. And cash, they’ve a lot of that. The One % has all of it, and extra – and as you’ll see in “Our Secret Society” by Tanisha C. Ford, they as soon as wished you to have it, too.
Mollie Moon knew what it was prefer to wrestle.
Born in 1907 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, she and her mom lived in a boardinghouse meant for migrants when Mollie was a child. Later, Mollie’s new stepfather moved the household to Gary, Indiana, the place Mollie witnessed “financial instability” brought on by mill shutdowns. When she was able to attend school, her mom hoped Mollie would turn out to be a pharmacist, which was “probably the most prestigious careers a Negro… might have within the Twenties” however that wasn’t what Mollie wished.
As a younger girl, she left Gary and moved to New York Metropolis, to Harlem, hoping to “make a deep social influence.” There, she met a few of Harlem’s elite performers and thinkers, whom she joined in Moscow, then on to Berlin. Rising Nazi affect compelled Mollie dwelling to New York the place she met Henry Lee Moon, who would in the future be her third husband.
With the contacts she’d made in her travels, the strategic friendships she loved with each Black and white elites, and the sensation that “Negroes deserved a style of the great life too,” Mollie honed her abilities as a fundraiser for the Harlem Neighborhood Arts Heart, after which for Nationwide City League. She and Henry have been “a racial-justice energy couple” they usually used that energy to assist giant organizations to higher the lives of Black folks all around the nation.
As time handed and viewpoints modified, nonetheless, some “discovered it troublesome to outline the position Mollie performed.” She nonetheless had affect, Ford says, but “she didn’t match the mould of a civil rights chief.” However somebody ready within the wings did…
Studying “Our Secret Society” is slightly like taking a visit by way of time.
Creator Tanisha C. Ford first transports readers again to a extra genteel period when Jazz-Age of us dressed for dinner, upper-crust youth loved a brand new permissiveness, and higher-class residents held salons of their houses to debate world affairs. Ford makes this look like a film script from a interval movie, and it’s oddly soothing.
However because the world modified, so does Ford’s story and it’s fairly fascinating to see how Mollie Moon seized the social energy she wanted with dedication, shifting simply throughout racial boundaries at a time when such boundaries appeared like strong partitions. Given this, it’s with dread that you simply’ll strategy the latter third of this e-book, as Ford takes readers to the Sixties and slightly slippage of Mollie Moon’s affect.
Nonetheless, you’ll want you knew Miss Mollie and for certain, you shouldn’t miss “Our Secret Society.” You must find out about this almost-hidden slice of historical past. You’ll like this e-book a hundred percent.
