What Today’s Fundraisers Can Learn About Raising Money During Turbulent Times From a Civil-Rights Era Rainmaker

Social worker and Harlem society queen Mollie Moon spent decades raising money for the National Urban League, helping keep the organization at the forefront of the civil-rights movement. Moon’s face graced society pages well into the 1960s, but her role funding the civil-rights movement has largely been forgotten. In her book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, historian Tanisha Ford dusts off Moon’s legacy.

“Mollie Moon was a complex figure, and it’s what made her exciting, fun for me to research,” Ford said in an interview with the Chronicle. “It also was complicated to tell her story because there were so many layers and dimensions, and in many ways, she didn’t fit standard narratives that we created around civil-rights movement activists.”

Fundraisers today are facing many of the challenges Moon faced in her career, including polarization over racial-justice issues and a challenging economic climate. Decades after Moon left her mark on philanthropy, fundraisers can still learn from the strategies and messages she employed.

Darcy Rogers

In 1942, Moon founded the the National Urban League Guild — later expanded as today’s National Council of Urban League Guilds — to recruit fundraising volunteers for the nonprofit. She spearheaded a variety of fundraising events while working full-time as a social worker. Her signature event was the Beaux Arts Ball, a gala with tickets priced for both everyday donors and wealthy philanthropists — “a very radical decision,” Ford says. Cultural luminaries like Josephine Baker and James Baldwin attended, as did politicians, business people, and philanthropists.

Moon was adept at engaging both small-dollar and major donors in civil-rights causes, a versitality that she adopted out of necessity, Ford says. That remains the case for many Black women in fundraising today, Ford says, because most Black-led nonprofits have margins that are too thin for a big fundraising team. She hopes her book inspires Black women who stand on Moon’s shoulders today. “This book is really a love letter to them,” she says.

We spoke with Ford about her research of Moon’s impact on the civil-rights movement, how that period changed philanthropy, and how those changes are expressed in philanthropy today.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Moon’s fundraising strategy was rooted in the Black giving tradition. How did she build off of that foundation?

African Americans and other people of African descent who have migrated to the United States or were forcibly brought there have traditions of generosity and mutual aid that predate Western notions of giving. These giving models are very much horizontal. It’s about creating our own base of economic support, keeping our dollars within the Black community, and building the kind of just world that we want to see on the other side of the era of enslavement in the United States and other parts of the Americas.

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Mollie Moon is born into a working-class family. They understand these traditions of mutual aid, of community benevolence and support. They understand the role that the Black church plays — not just as a religious institution but as a social, cultural, and political anchor in the Black community. Mollie and her mother migrate to Cleveland when Mollie is very young and join a Black migrant community there. Migrant communities are supported by these kinds of benevolent networks. Black traditions of giving are about giving time, volunteering, the power of small-dollar donations. That’s the spirit that informs Mollie’s work, even after she becomes the face of the glitzy, glam big-dollar fundraisers of the National Urban League.

How did the civil-rights movement change philanthropy?

By the early 1960s, the fight for racial equality was the issue garnering media attention in mainstream and African American newspapers. Corporate America and foundation philanthropy had to figure out how they would enter into that conversation. It wasn’t that foundations weren’t doing this work before, but the scale and scope of the civil-rights movement changed what this engagement looked like. You start to see this shift — similar to what we saw happen in 2020, with pledges and investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion. By the early 1960s, even more people are getting involved in the civil-rights movement because it seems safer — it seems progressive, hip, and cool to do it.

A younger generation within family foundations — for example, Winthrop Rockefeller and his brothers, who formed the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — want to throw money behind civil-rights causes. Stephen Currier and his wife, Audrey — who are behind the Taconic Foundation — stepped into this fray. The Field Foundation was another one. These organizations pivot their attention to racial equality and ending racial segregation. You start to see major foundations throw support behind organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They saw them as willing to work within the system. The boldest of these foundations then implement a grants structure where local affiliates of civil-rights organizations can apply for funding.

Corporations that saw themselves as more progressive wanted to be in the business of racial equality as well. It could expand their consumer base with African Americans who wanted to shop on the other side of the color line. Some corporations were willing to work with the National Urban League’s employment programs to bring a token African American into the corporate space as a telephone operator or a janitor or some other low-level, white-collar position.

Radical Black activists criticized Moon and the National Urban League Guild for accepting donations from white millionaires and foundation philanthropy. How were those critiques echoed during the racial-justice protests of 2020?

When Mollie Moon begins her work as a fundraiser, African Americans do not have access to social services. We see the establishment of a Black nonprofit sector to attend to the needs of the African American community — the bulk of whom live below the poverty line — as the racial wealth gap widens. These nonprofits are really important resources, and they need a fundraising strategy behind them. As we get on the other side of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, there’s a wave of anti-Black violence, both vigilante and economic. The money that Black nonprofits receive from foundations and corporations is essential to keeping these social services afloat. There is a criticism to be made for taking that money because it comes with strings attached.

We can see where these organizations end up by the time we get to 2020. Radical Black activists were critical of them because they felt like they had now become institutionalized. They were receiving so much money from the federal government and corporations that they could never be any good to Black communities, particularly the Black working poor, because they would never advance a racial-justice initiative that would offend the white hand of philanthropy. Once George Floyd is killed by a police officer, and we see Black death on display across social media, people are looking for more radical means to solve these issues. You see people supporting mutual-aid networks and grassroots organizations that do the kind of Black social-services work that we can date back to Reconstruction.

I’m writing Our Secret Society during this moment and thinking, Wow, so much of this looks the same. I’m interviewing Black women who work in the nonprofit space today, and they are talking about how very little has changed. Black organizations, particularly Black-women-led nonprofits, still do not receive the kind of funds that nonprofits led by their white counterparts receive.

What can today’s fundraisers learn from Mollie’s skills and experience as a fundraiser?

There are still so many Black and brown women who are working in the fundraising space and are underpaid and overworked. They are doing work that feels thankless. They are, every day, trying to push a boulder up a mountain. That is work that Mollie Moon understood, because she was doing it while still having a full-time job and raising a child.

Mollie Moon had to figure out how to present herself in a way that she could translate the message of the National Urban League and its social services work to these big-dollar donors. She had to go into their homes and attend dinners and private functions and speak with their friends and colleagues. Oftentimes, she was the only African American woman in these rooms besides the domestic help. At the same time, Mollie Moon couldn’t seem like she didn’t understand the plight of everyday African Americans. She still needed to be able to speak to them and get them to turn up en masse to donate pocket change to an Urban League quarter drive.

She had the personality that was perfectly suited for this kind of work. She was well educated — she had a degree in pharmacy from Meharry Medical College — and she was a social worker with the Department of Welfare in New York, which was a major job for a Black woman in that time period. But she still had that spirit of the people because she was not born into wealth. She could still talk the language; she understood what it was like to be living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Mollie Moon did not shrink herself, no matter what room she found herself walking in. And I think that that’s also what made African-Americans proud of her.

My goal, as a historian, was to show Black women fundraisers that you come from a long genealogy of Black women before you who were doing this work. This book is a tribute to those women who are still toiling in the role of fundraiser, who are trying to stay connected to communities while also trying to secure big-dollar donations for the communities that they serve and keep their own lights on.

For additional excerpts from the Chronicle‘s conversation with Tanisha Ford, sign up for the Fundraising Update newsletter. Our Feb. 21 newsletter will share Ford’s take on how Moon dealt with uncomfortable conversations.