How Black socialite Mollie Moon raised millions to fund the civil rights movement

When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, opulent parties are probably not the first thing that come to mind. But it turns out, they were a big part of the fight for racial justice — especially the events organized by Black socialite Mollie Moon in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

"I stumbled across the name Mollie Moon in the newspaper clippings of the early 1960s. ... She was hosting this amazing beauty pageant that celebrated the beauty of Black women," Ford says."So I just tucked her name in the back of my mind and thought, 'I'm going to write something about this woman.

"What African Americans feared was that that kind of influence would then steer the movement away from the issues that African Americans cared about and ... toward issues that felt safe for white Americans," Ford says. "I have found that once I started to turn my attention to the money, that this story humanizes these people even more, and it makes the stakes of movement building all the more clear," Ford says.These parties, by all accounts, were fabulous. Her signature event was the Beaux Arts Ball.

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