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This is Fresh Air, and I'm Tonya Mosley.

Let's go to New York City.

The year is 1948, and one of the most opulent parties of the summer is underway on the 65th

floor of the Rockefeller Center.

Inside of the exclusive rainbow room, Billy Holiday graces the stage, singing a stirring

rendition of strange fruit to some of New York's most powerful elite, who are for the first

time rubbing shoulders in Midtown Manhattan with civil rights activists and members of the

Black Upper echelon to raise money for the National Urban League.

The hosts are Win Rockefeller, grandson of oil magnet John D Rockefeller, and Molly Moon,

a Black woman from Mississippi known as the Great Dame of Harlem Society.

Never heard of Molly Moon?

Historian Tanisha Ford had neither until she happened upon her a few years ago.

And Ford's new book, Our Secret Society, Molly Moon and the Glamour, Money and Power

Behind the Civil Rights Movement, Tanisha Ford shares the untold story of Molly Moon, known

as one of the most influential women of the civil rights era.

As president of the fundraising arm of the National Urban League, Moon is credited with

raising millions to build economic and racial equality in America.

Tanisha Ford is a historian, cultural critic, and author.

She is a professor of history, biography, and memoir at the Graduate Center CUNY.

...