Once a year, from the early 1940s through the ’80s, members of New York society—high and low, Black and white—dressed up in elaborate costumes and made their way to the National Urban League’s Beaux Arts Ball, a winter fundraiser for the civil rights group. The theme changed annually, which meant one year women done up as cancan dancers would foxtrot with men in togas, and the next Tarzans would waltz with Janes. Distinguished guest judges—Winthrop Rockefeller and Josephine Baker (pictured above, left), to name two—would vote for best costume.
At the center of the festivities was National Urban League Guild president Mollie Moon (pictured above, right), the powerhouse fundraiser behind the event and its most enthusiastic celebrant. Each year she could be seen darting around the ballroom greeting the Harlem business owners, Upper East Side philanthropists, and civil rights leaders she had helped bring together under one roof. As the Urban League grew in prominence, the party moved from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to Rockefeller Center, and ultimately to the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria.
Moon became a fixture in the Black and mainstream press—known as the activist who energized a generation of Black and white donors to support, through the ball and many other initiatives, the Urban League’s mission to create equal opportunities for Black Americans. But while many of the people she worked with have become household names, Moon, who died in 1990, has faded into relative obscurity.
Now she is the subject of a fascinating new book, Our Secret Society, written by Tanisha C. Ford, a professor of history at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Ford chronicles Moon’s upbringing in the Midwest, her formative years as an activist traveling to Moscow and Berlin,…
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