In Our Secret Society (Amistad, Oct.), historian Ford profiles civil rights fund-raiser and socialite Mollie Moon.

How did you first come across Mollie Moon?

I was digging around in the archives and found this woman who hosted all of these amazing parties in Harlem in the early 1960s, and I thought, wow, Mollie Moon, what a name. Through the press clippings, I saw that she was kind of like the grande dame of Harlem. Everyone knew her name, everyone knew her parties, everyone wanted to be invited. That was intriguing to me, to see a Black woman who seemed to have the kind of social power that could bring wealthy philanthropists, white and Black, into a room.

How did she go from pharmacist to left-wing activist and social worker?

Yeah, she studied pharmacy. But she began her career as the country was spiraling into the Great Depression. She moved from Indiana to New York, where there was so much thriving energy around the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, and she became friends with a lot of the great thinkers of the day. She briefly became part of this group that went to Moscow to make a propaganda film to expose the horrors of Jim Crow segregation. She returned to New York and ended up with a career in social work, because at that time there was a need for social services for Black migrants who were coming from places like Mississippi, where Mollie was from.

And then she founded the Beaux Arts Ball.

The Beaux Arts Ball was definitely Mollie’s brainchild. It drew upon Afro-Caribbean traditions of Carnival, and also Black queer traditions of drag balls that were popular in Harlem at the time. Some of the early ball photos, oh my goodness, they look like they were just a ripping good time. The ball takes on a different tone over the decades, of course—it becomes more corporate, more of a fund-raising vehicle for the Urban League. But the who’s who of New York City would turn out to those early balls.

Can you talk about her personality? She seems ahead of her time.

She seemed to defy the stereotyped categories that we’ve created to study Black women connected to the civil rights movement, like the pious church lady, or the young Black radical. She wasn’t somebody I could easily pin down. I think that Mollie Moon allows us to have a different kind of conversation about what it could mean to care about the Black community—to have political conviction, but also love the lavishness of life. To believe that Black people deserve luxury, that Black people deserve leisure, that Black people deserve rest.