- Thank you so much, Meredith, for that introduction.
I was telling her earlier that, every time she
introduces one of us, we leave feeling really motivated,
and like, is she talking about me?
Is this my work?
Am I that amazing?
So I appreciate that.
I also want to say thank you to everyone at the Radcliffe
Institute.
You all take such good care of us
and make us feel so special-- everyone
from Jess, who always gives me a warm smile when
I walk in the building, to the folks who have helped me
when I've locked myself out of the office at night.
So I'm thankful to you all.
And also I want to say thank you to my fellow Fellows,
many of whom have heard me speak about my research.
And so it's a pleasure to present it in more fullness
and richness, I hope, today.
But also to friends and colleagues
who are on various fellowships across campus
that I've been able to connect with since I've been here.
Thank you to you all, especially my folks from the Hutchins
Center who came over to see me.
I'm glad that you're here.
So let me just say that this is my first time presenting
any of this research, so I want to allow myself
to be loose with it and have some fun, because, as Meredith
said, I'm a serious scholar, but I also like to bring some humor
and hilarity to my work because I think it keeps me grounded,
and it keeps me human and realizing that I'm not just
a thinker.
I'm also a three dimensional being.
So I want to bring some of that energy to the podium
tonight as I present on this work, "The Glamorous Life--
Socialite Activists and the Black Freedom Struggle
from World War II to the Age of Obama."
First I'd like to say I'm sorry to anyone
who wanted to hear me talk about Barack Obama in depth.
I won't be doing that tonight.
I'm kind of starting from the front end of the project.
So most of it will be about this immediate post-World War II
era, but I'm more than happy to let you know what I'm thinking
about Barack Obama--
in particular, one of his early members of his administration
who I might speak about in a little bit of detail
if there's enough time towards the end of my talk.
But I'm happy to talk about Barack Obama during the Q&A.
So the first kernels of this product
actually date back to graduate school
when I was working on my first book, Liberated Threads,
and I'll give you a sense of how I arrived
at this topic a little bit later on, but my interest in it
never died.
When you're a graduate researcher and you say,
oh, this is going to be my second book because you
find a few interesting documents in the archive,
but does it really become the second book?
So I guess technically this will be my second book,
but it is one of my--
the project that I imagined then-- it still
is very similar to what I imagined then in terms
of its shape and scope.
And I used the Schomburg Center Fellowship
to collect much of the archival material
that I'll present on today, but it
wasn't until this last semester at the Radcliffe
that I was able to actually start
analyzing some of that data.
So what I'm going to be presenting tonight
are some of my first impressions about a lot
of the research I found in the archive
while I was at the Schomburg Center.
Tea and shade, an introduction.
And for me it's a way of thinking
about the embodiment of the women in this era
that they were living through--
tea and shade.
How many people are familiar with this language, tea
and shade?
I know.
You're probably like, oh, I knew that.
As soon as I said it, you're like,
I already know what tea and shade means.
She don't have to tell me.
But I'm going to tell you a little bit about how
tea and shade informs how I'm thinking
about these socialite activist women.
So in spring 1954, the New York Amsterdam News
published a series of stories on black society women.
Betty Granger, the series author and Amsterdam News
social editor, argued that society life
had changed quite drastically since the days
when A'Lelia Walker reigned as the queen of black social life
in New York City.
The millionaire heiress to the Madam C.J. Walker
beauty empire hosted lavish events,
both at her Manhattan apartment and also
at her Westchester county estate villa, [INAUDIBLE]..
By the time of Granger's series, the original black 400
had all but died off, and many of their customs, rituals,
and standards had perished with them.
Who was the current grand dame of black society?
Granger wanted to know.
What were the new requirements for becoming a social leader?
Granger wrote, "we want our readers
to decide in true democratic fashion exactly who rules
supreme as New York's modern day social queen."
For three weeks, the Amsterdam News
accepted letters and postcards from readers
who casted their votes.
And the letters poured in even from people
who didn't live in New York, but who wanted to offer commentary
on the so-called black elite.
Commenting on the old guard rules
for becoming part of the negro aristocracy,
Granger reminded readers that it's long
been said that to join the ranks of black society you must,
quote, "take a woman with some family background [? add in ?]
a basic education, toss in some accessible cash,
and mix plentifully with membership in one or two
nationally established clubs or sororities.
And there you have the fundamental requirements
for our social potpourri," unquote.
Yet she notes that there were regional,
or even state to state differences.
She claimed that in the Midwest--
notably Chicago and Detroit--
it's money and more money that makes an ambitious gal
eligible for high society.
In Atlanta, she says it's education.
A PhD is your best bet for social success.
In Charleston, South Carolina, your rank in the social order
is gauged by quote, "the paleness of your skin."
And in Boston, she says it's family background and nothing
else that lets you in.
So she notes here that, whereas people had just
accepted these rules pretty much as gospel,
that in the post World War II era, that people were
challenging these ideas, and that there was opportunity
for people who never would have been considered
part of black society to now enter that said society.
So people were critiquing colorism,
possessing distinguished family name, and requirement
of generational wealth.
Well, essentially the whole entire system--
everything she said that people wanted you to have to be a part
of society--
she says now it's pretty much a no go.
People are trying to throw out these old rules.
So at the end of the three week voting period,
Granger noted that they received hundreds of letters
from readers near and far.
And the Amsterdam News, of course,
published the most provocative missives.
And again, let me say people had many feelings on the topic.
And they was all up in their feelings.
So for example, Ms. Avis [? Malcoa, ?] an employee
of the Edison Hotel, goes in, calling out what she considers
the types of socialites-- the nasty snobs with too much
useless education, the dumb yellow chicks--
these are her words, not mine--
who use their good looks to make up for their lack of pedigree,
and the big shot women who lucked into wealth by hitting
the lottery, but have none of the social graces.
For example, she says, they buy Cadillacs with their winnings,
throw wild parties, drink all the brown liquor, and, quote,
"wind up talking loud and wrong."
[LAUGHTER]
[? Malcoa ?] pivots to acknowledge the women
she feels are outstanding members of our race,
women who have given unselfishly to uplift the race--
the entire race, not just a particular class.
She names Mary McLeod Bethune, who
you're going to hear about in a little bit,
and Marian Anderson as examples.
Eva Tucker, a member of the Metropolitan Mothers Club--
so she would have been one of these society women--
wrote in saying that the modern social leader must
be an intelligent career woman, who must have distinguished
themselves in this community in terms of civic leadership.
She must entertain in good taste and smart style,
because according to Tucker, quote,
"Madam Walker's style of big time entertaining
is no longer fashionable.
People woke up to the fact a long time ago
that spending hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars
on food and drink for would be friends
wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do," end quote.
On the top of Eve Tucker's list, a society leader
who met all of her requirements was
a woman who most people in this room
have never heard of before--
Mollie Moon.
My talk will center on Moon, the undisputed social queen
of Harlem in the mid 20th century.
In her obituary in 1990, Jet magazine,
one of the black bibles, wrote that Moon
had raised $3.4 million for the National Urban League,
and she'd also helped fundraiser for other smaller Harlem based
organizations and institutions.
Moon is most known for founding the Urban League Guild
and serving as president of the Guild for 50 years.
That's a long time.
[LAUGHTER]
That should tell you something about her personality.
I'm just saying.
The Urban League Guild was the social wing of the National
Urban League that helped translate the organization's
mission to everyday people and wealthy would be donors.
In short, they made the organization look cool and have
broader appeal.
In hip hop parlance, the Guild was the hype man to the emcee.
I first learned of Mollie as a graduate student
trying to learn all I could about
black nationalist protests against a white owned wig shop.
And the more I learned about her and the Beaux-Arts costume ball
and beauty pageant the Guild hosted each year,
the more I became intrigued not only
by how she raised all of that money
and for which specific causes, but by the culture
of fundraising and the lifestyle of a fundraiser,
a social and political powerbroker
and the powerbroker's role within this larger
constellation of activists and intellectuals
who feature prominently in civil rights movement history.
And I've been followed following the money trail,
and it's led me to some interesting places--
some scandalous places, even.
I've also discovered the names of other women like Mollie
who have used their social cache and extensive networks to host
both public and private events for a range of organizations
devoted to racial equality.
So the scholarship has taught us--
and it's a rather robust scholarship
that says that black women were the backbone of the movement.
No matter what period of time we look
at, this is true, whether we are talking about the civil rights
movement, the feminist movement, the Black
Lives Matter movement of today.
Women are the backbone.
However, the nature and international scope
of their fundraising has gone understudied.
So what I've been trying to do then
is piece together this history and understand why these women
are not in the historiography.
So I think part of the problem is a question about paradigms.
So in my first book, Liberated Threads,
I tried to introduce a new way or paradigm
for studying the civil rights movement,
because what I'd realized was that black women's activism had
been kind of categorized into these types--
so the respectable church lady and the radical freedom fighter
being two of them that have emerged from this time period
as lenses for seeing and understanding
black women's cultural and political activism--
and also because questions of periodization and subfield
specific questions have meant that Mollie
Moon and her generation have not been highly visible
because they haven't fit neatly within the black women's club
movement literature, which typically ends
at the start of World War II.
And temporally, Mollie's generation
considered themselves patrons of the arts.
That was one of their major commitments
in terms of their activism, and they'd
fall into this lacuna between the scholarship of the Harlem
Renaissance in the '20s and '30s and the black arts
movement in the '60s and '70s.
So for me, I'm interested in what
they were doing in the '40s and '50s
as it relates to black arts and the protection
and proliferation of black arts in that time period.
Also, I find that we don't see them in the old left
to new left conversation, which typically doesn't focus
on black women much at all, but they also
haven't been taken up in this black internationalism
scholarship either.
And they also aren't part of this black intellectual history
turn, because they sit at this interesting and quite
challenging to recover intersection of civil rights
history, business history, beauty and grooming culture,
fashion, consumer and economics, and also material culture.
So there's this small yet burgeoning body of scholarship
that does this type of recovery work.
So I would say my first two books, I think, do this work
and try to establish a way for doing this work through what I
call eclectic archiving, which, as Meredith mentioned earlier,
requires me to draw from a lot of different types of source
material and also take an interdisciplinary approach
to the study of history.
But then there is also Robert Weems,
Desegregating the Black Dollar.
Susannah Walker, Style and Status.
My colleague Tiffany Gill's Beauty Shop Politics
and her new book on black women and travel.
And as we talk more and more about our work,
we realize we have so many women in common
they overlap in our work.
And then also Quincy Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line,
and his new project, The Wages of Resistance,
which also looks at how the civil rights and black power
organizations negotiated their need for funds and fundraising
with their anti capitalist and anti imperialist ideologies.
In my own work, I'm toying with this concept of black glamor
as a guiding framework to uncover
the modes of embodied activism that Mollie and her peers
employed.
It began with my fascination with our collective fascination
with the black glamor set.
Entire Tumblrs and Instagrams have
been devoted to celebrating black history of glamor
as a way to celebrate our humanity, our style,
our pleasure and joy, the beauty of our people,
to challenge the notion that high femininity and refinement
was solely for white women--
that black women have been about that life,
which is really true.
Look at any time period.
Black women have been glamorous.
Thus glamor becomes an interesting way
to examine insider-outsider cultures and class
categories that become much more malleable when we think
of glamor as a performance, one that
is often more about aspiration than what
one has in the bank account.
So by winning the battle on the taste lines, if not
the front lines, of the movement,
Moon and those who followed in her footsteps
influenced modern rules of etiquette, style, and party
planning that continue to be promulgated by Ladies Home
Journal and W magazine.
So these women, with their impeccable sense of style,
and good looks, and cosmopolitan charm,
had the cultural capital necessary to host
these star studded fundraising events
and exclusive parties that brought politicians, activists,
and prominent philanthropists, such as the Rockefellers,
the Vanderbilts, and the Fields--
of the Marshall Field's department store empire--
and so forth into conversation with one another
and with a wider movement.
So I delve into this opulent world of the black middle class
or this black elite to examine how
conspicuous consumption, pleasure,
and leisure culture both coalesce with
and undermine the aims of the Black Freedom Project.
Specifically, I, like Quincy Mills,
am thinking critically about how Moon and her ilk
are touting relationships with families whose names are
synonymous with American capitalism and heads of state
in the British empire--
of the British empire in the Caribbean,
while activists like Claudia Jones
are using every platform possible to dismantle
imperialism.
But somebody has got to raise the money.
[LAUGHTER]
So if we look at all of these organizations,
we see some ties that raise eyebrows.
Enter the tea and the shade.
So these women were hyper visible in the archive,
and in my own archive I now have over 2,000 clippings
from black newspapers on Moon and Eunice
Johnson, who features prominently in the work,
and also Desiree Rogers, who was the first social secretary
of the Obama administration.
And when I'm reading these newspaper clippings
and putting them in conversation with all sorts
of other material, including literature and menus
from the venues they hosted their events,
from personal correspondence, I see that the tea was spilling,
and the shade was intense, especially from the Baltimore
Afro-American.
That was a shady newspaper.
I love them.
I love reading their account of this black high society
and the fact that they feel like, from their vantage point
in Baltimore, they have the ability
to speak on what's happening in New York, the big town
black society, in ways that the New York Amsterdam News can't
because they are essentially a vehicle of the National Urban
League.
So I want to just talk a little bit about Mollie, a woman
that I have really come to admire a lot.
I love her.
I love writing about complicated black women,
and she is complicated, and complex,
and messy in all the ways that makes my job as a historian
and a storyteller fun.
So I love her.
So to put it bluntly, Mollie was a hustler.
Mollie came from a family of no importance that
wasn't at all wealthy, and that had migrated from the south
to the Midwest.
And in the Midwest, I'm talking about Gary, Indiana.
And I can say it like that because I'm from Indiana.
So by the time I encounter Mollie in the archive,
she is moving back and forth between New York and Gary.
She was born allegedly in 1912.
I don't know.
I just like these women-- are you really telling
the truth about your age?
I don't really know.
So many of her background details
are sketchy because she, like a lot of women
in this interwar period who were moving across the US,
were using this as an opportunity
to remake themselves.
So Mollie attended Meharry Medical College,
and she earned a degree in pharmacy.
She takes a few classes at Columbia's teacher college,
and she eventually becomes a social worker of all things.
And she meets Henry Lee Moon, who
will become her husband, on a trip to Russia
in the early 1930s.
So she did her bit to study abroad,
and she was learning German, too.
And Henry is also from the midwest,
and he's from Cleveland, but from a more prominent family.
His father actually founded the chapter of the NAACP
in Cleveland.
Henry has a degree from Howard.
He pledged Omega Psi Phi, so he has the fraternity credentials
there.
He earned a master's degree, and he's
a journalist writing for the Amsterdam News when they meet.
He goes on to become a public relations
director for the NAACP and also a writer for the crisis.
While Mollie's moving back and forth between her mother's home
in Gary and New York City, where she's meeting all these folks,
she finds that she has a knack for meeting
wealthy, wealthy people--
prominent writers.
For example, I was digging around in the Schlesinger
archive, and I found this letter from Mollie
to writer Dorothy West.
And in it, Dorothy--
for people who don't know, Dorothy
is the daughter of one of the wealthiest black families
in Boston.
And Mollie is saying to her, I'm flat broke.
We should move in together.
[LAUGHTER]
You can help me pay my bills, and we can split our rent.
I think she says here it would be $14 for each of us
if we move in together.
So she has this knack for meeting people,
for making friends.
She's good at corresponding and keeping in touch with people.
And so by the time she marries Henry Lee Moon in 1938,
she is known for being this active woman
on the social scene in New York City.
And let me just say this as an aside.
It just made me love her more, but when
they start corresponding--
I've been all up in their letters--
they write the way we text.
I mean, there's just so many letters,
and he was pretty much engaged to this other woman.
And so Mollie's writing him, oh, hey, hey, all this stuff.
They're friends.
And then before you know it, she has him paying
her mother's medical bills.
[LAUGHTER]
I was like, yes, Mollie.
So anyway, she ends up moving to New York City,
and they get married.
They get a place together, and they
become known as the socialite and the intellectual.
They both see themselves as race people.
She's a race woman.
So she's not just a party planner.
She is also a woman who cares very
much about the equality of black people
and ending racial disparities.
And so she first tries to mold herself
after some of these women of the black 400, as they were known,
these women who--
are you familiar with this language of the 400?
In the late 19th century it was this idea
that, oh, we're going to throw this party,
and we're going to invite--
it can fit 400 people, so we're only
going to invite the most important 400 society people.
So then, of course, black people had their version
of this, the black 400.
So Mollie is trying to model herself
after Bessye Bearden, who is Romare Bearden's mom
and very active on the social and art scenes in Harlem.
But by the time she establishes the Guild in 1942,
she realizes that this is her place,
that this is the way that she can make her mark.
And so in 1947, the Los Angeles Sentinel
writes "undisputed Harlem hostess
beyond comparison this season is individual dynamic Mollie Moon.
Her parties gather the most fascinating people in town.
They're like the Negro Renaissance
era in flavor and texture.
Nobody in town can come near her for sheer excellence
in unusual party giving.
She reigns supreme and legendary."
So these are some images from an Urban League luncheon
that Mollie is hosting.
Mollie is standing with the white blazer on.
So then a pivotal moment happens in her career
as this socialite who's trying to really emerge as a race
woman, as well.
In May, 1951, Mollie called the Hotel Pierre
to book the rooftop garden and secure catering for a party
to be held on the evening of July 20.
Now, the key to being a successful socialite
and hostess is--
as you can imagine, I'm sure-- location, location, location.
You have to have the dopest spots to have your events--
period.
People want to go somewhere that they
can feel like, oh, yes, this is the place to be.
So she's hosting the Urban League's wealthiest donors
at this event, and so she decides
that the Pierre, with its Upper East Side address--
it sits at 2 East 61st and Fifth Avenue--
have that air of refinement and exclusivity
that Mollie needed for the event.
Plus it was a visually stunning hotel from its decor
to its unobstructed views of Central Park.
And so she calls over the phone to book
the garden on the roof for her event, and she's told,
sure, yes, you can book the event there.
We can get the catering set up, et cetera.
So then Mollie strolls into the Pierre to pay her deposit.
This is how I imagine she walked in there.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know.
And then I imagine her sounding like Eartha Kitt and saying,
yes, darling, I'm here to pay my deposit.
So she goes to pay this deposit, and the assistant
to the catering manager is like, oh, no.
That room is closed.
It's booked that day.
It's booked that day.
I think they told her it was booked that day,
and they told her it was closed.
They told her both.
It's closed for repairs, and it's already booked.
And so she was saying, well, hey, I was told over the phone
that I can make this booking.
And he's like, no, you can't.
The man she spoke to on the phone, a guy named
WM [? Willey, ?] refused to speak to her in person.
And a couple of days later, Mollie had one of her friends
go in there then since they refused
to give her the booking--
the wife of a prominent Wall Street attorney
named Elizabeth [? Fillman ?] and she
had her attempt to book the rooftop for that same day.
So [? Willey, ?] the banquet manager,
asked [? Fillman ?] if any colored persons would be
attending the event she was planning.
He reminded her that the Pierre was a high class hotel.
Once she assured him that no Negroes would be present,
he accepted her booking.
Well, that was all the proof Mollie needed.
She filed a lawsuit against Getty Realty Corporation,
the company that owned the hotel, the banquet manager,
and his assistant under the sections 40 and 41 of the New
York State Civil Rights Law concerning
public accommodations.
And then [? Fillman ?] and another person whom Molly
had booked the rooftop for that day--
for the day before, actually, since she
was told that it was-- one of the excuses
they gave her that it was closed for repairs.
She had both of them testify for her in court.
And the judge presiding over the case
was a man named Abraham Goodman, who presided over
one of the first cases tried in New York following
the enactment of the civil rights law.
So Mollie won her case and received a $600 settlement.
So the max she could receive was $500 per defendant,
and so she wins this $600, and people see this as a victory.
And the Baltimore Afro-American writes the Urban League Guild
was, quote, "more militant than the parent group
which organized it."
Shade, right?
I just love it.
So they're saying basically that Mollie was bold enough
to do something that even the Urban League
Guild doesn't use as a tactic.
She was using the court systems in her favor,
and once she did this, her popularity really skyrocketed.
Just as a note of aside here in terms of methods,
once I found this lawsuit, I started to, A, look
to see if there were other similar lawsuits.
Are these socialite women who want to host garden rooftop
parties saying, well, listen, if you won't give us bookings,
we will sue you.
Some I'm looking for that, but I'm also
keeping a list of hotels that are mentioned
in the black press as places that allowed
them to host these events.
And so here's a list of the names
that I've come across so far.
Now, I will admit most of my research
has been going through documents based on Mollie in New York
City, so I imagine that, as I dig
into the research in DC and Chicago,
more hotels will be added to this list.
So like I said, after this event--
after the lawsuit, Mollie's popularity soars.
And she's honored as woman of the year for her 14
years of [? inspiring ?] and distinguished leadership
with the Urban League Guild, the Harlem Hospital
Auxiliary, and the Spence-Chapin adoption service.
And it's noted in the publication--
this is not about that--
I just like this because she's wearing a fur and a big hat,
and I love a big hat.
But this image-- it just kind of speaks to the identity
that she's trying to create at the time.
But when she receives this award,
Ralph J. Bunche presents her with the award,
and so the black press is like, Mollie's famous.
Ralph Bunche is presenting her with an award.
And then the legendary journalist and society woman
Gerri Major, who was part of the black 400,
toasted Mollie, as well as her very good friend,
Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, the wife of Alfred Vanderbilt II.
So she has these famous and important friends
who see her as an important woman,
and also in 1959 she was honored alongside Lorraine Hansberry
for her commitment to civic welfare.
So they're feting Lorraine Hansberry,
and Mollie is right there with Lorraine Hansberry.
I'm saying this just to give you a sense
of the scope of her popularity and the reach,
but she was also this very polarizing figure.
So on the one hand, she has the engine
of the black press who's promoting
everything she's doing.
On the other hand-- except for the Baltimore Afro-American.
They're not having anything--
they will critique her when they feel like it's necessary,
but she's also the subject of much scrutiny and criticism.
She's accused of misappropriating funds,
and that was actually a very interesting article to read,
where basically the New York Amsterdam
News reports that the Urban League is like, OK, hands off.
We're going to let them figure it out
because a white woman was claiming
that Mollie misappropriated funds for events.
So they kind of took a hands off approach
and let Molly handle it.
There was also lots of gossip about her alleged affairs,
and in the mid 1960s, she sued a very prominent and wealthy
white socialite for $1 million for defamation.
There was scrutiny about her interracial approach
to race relations, and one of the most fascinating things
I found on this was a book by Chester Himes,
a social and political satire called Pinktoes.
It was published in 1961--
where Moon is the inspiration for the maligned protagonist
Mamie Mason.
And so Himes is critical of Mamie Mason
and these interracial parties that she
throws, which he considers orgies for the racial uplift
cause.
And what's interesting is that Himes
is first cousins to Mollie's husband, Henry,
and so he was actually living with Mollie and Henry
at the time that he's doing all this research for the book.
And then he writes this scathing piece on interracial race
relations and their parties for the book.
Got to love family.
[LAUGHTER]
It's an interesting book.
You should check it out.
So in my last few minutes, I want
to say a little bit specifically about fundraising here.
So as I mentioned earlier, one of Mollie's most popular events
was the Beaux-Arts Ball, which she started hosting in 1942.
And these balls were the major fundraisers
for the Urban League Guild.
As you can see here--
well, first let me point out this is Mollie here.
Isn't that a hat?
That's a hat, isn't it?
So this is the Beaux-Arts queen for that year.
Do you know who this is?
- [INAUDIBLE].
- Right.
So we got Josephine Baker here.
I mean, when Mollie can make Josephine Baker look
like just a regular person when she's like woo.
[LAUGHTER]
So I love this picture.
This is from another ball, and remember,
they were costume balls, so each year had a theme.
[? They're ?] [? looking ?] like she's like, I hear you, bro,
but no.
Her body language here is so interesting,
but this is another one of the balls,
and then here's Mollie with Gordon Parks and Gloria
Vanderbilt at another one of the balls.
So these are the major fundraisers.
They were public, and it was the social event
of the year for blacks in Harlem,
but also people traveling from out of town
to attend this event.
And by 1955, the year after Betty Granger's Amsterdam News
series on social leaders, Mollie's Beaux-Arts ball
had raised nearly $420,000 in today's figures
for the Urban League.
And it was one of the most popular events on the New York
social calendar, which, as I mentioned,
brought together celebrities, everyday folks,
philanthropists, and so forth.
And it was fueled by this Miss Beaux-Arts pageant, which
is how I stumbled across Mollie to begin with,
because one of their pageant queens
was the face of this white owned wig shop
that my black nationalist folk, Kwame Brathwaite,
were protesting against.
So I was like, this woman's a Beaux-Arts queen.
What's a Beaux-Arts queen?
So that's how I found Mollie-- through the pageant, which
was sponsored by the Schaefer Brewing Company.
And they put forth all this money
to fund the beauty pageant, and each year people
would vote on a slate of beauty queen contestants.
And they've noted in the Amsterdam News
that they would have upwards of a million people voting
for the Beaux-Arts queen, so this just
gives you a sense of the scope.
But I don't want to go on too much about these balls,
because at the end of the day, a gala is a gala.
A lot of us have been to those events before.
What I have found fascinating is the emphasis
on these fashion shows--
fashion shows as fundraisers.
So they were common in the early 20th century amongst
the original black 400 and people like [? Bernie ?]
[? Austen ?] and Bessye Bearden, and A'Lelia Walker would host
these events, these fundraiser events,
that featured the fashions of a lot of black women designers,
but with the Great Depression and then also the rations
on textiles during World War II they kind of fell out of vogue.
But when I looked through some of the clippings
in terms of where Mollie was going
or what the Urban League Guild was up to,
they decided to host their Urban League Guild executive
meeting in Chicago during--
to coincide with the Urban Aid's,
which was like the local Chicago version of the Urban League
Guild--
their annual fashion show to see if that model which
had been successful in Chicago could be a fundraising
model they could implement in other guilds
across the country.
So it looks to me that Mollie does decide
that fashion shows would be good fundraisers for the Guild,
and by 1959 not only are the fashion
shows regular fundraisers, Mollie partners
with Eunice Johnson, who is the founder of the Ebony Fashion
Fair and wife of John Johnson, who, of course, owns Johnson
Publication-- so Ebony, Jet, Negro Digest-- to bring
the Ebony Fashion Fair to the Waldorf Astoria
in New York in 1959.
And I don't know about you all, but I grew up--
we had Ebony Fashion Fair in my hometown when I grew up.
It was a big thing, but I never realized what the fashion fair
was other than a fashion fair.
A local organization would host the fair,
and they would use the moneys raised
to support whatever cause was the cause of that year
for the organization.
So by the time Mollie had brought
the fashion fair to New York City,
the fair had traveled to 51 cities and 31 states.
Enter Mary McLeod Bethune, who I mentioned earlier,
who, at this point in the late 1940s,
is still the President of the National Association of Negro
Women.
And she sponsors the creation of the National Association
of Fashion and Accessories Designers.
We'll just call it NAFAD.
So I say late '40s because this is when NAFAD is founded.
So by the time we get to the late 1950s
when these fashion shows are very common,
we have an organization for black women fashion
and accessories designers.
Now think about this.
In this era of Jim Crow, the fashion industry
was segregated.
So these black women who were trying
to move from being deemed as seamstresses to being designers
are now trying to get work in the haute couture industry,
but they can't find jobs.
So NAFAD becomes a vehicle through which
they can work on professionalization, where
they can develop their craft.
They can establish and extend their professional networks.
And it becomes a place where they can brand themselves
as designers.
And so NAFAD helped launch the careers of people
like Lois Alexander, who now a lot of people
know because she designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding gown.
And Zelda Wynn Valdes--
I'm writing a piece for Valdes for the New York
Times that will hopefully be published in a few days.
But they are using these fashion show fundraisers
as a way to launch their career, so very much we
see this emphasis on equality in all types of employment
industries and the rise in fashion
shows as fundraisers as interlocked.
And I think it's really important
to think about Mary McLeod Bethune in this moment,
because I think that the way we've constructed her
as a woman who's interested in the equality of women,
and women's rights, and also black education-- we wouldn't
associate her with something like fashion, which
people think is frivolous.
But what she says--
this is another industry where black women need work.
This is another industry where we're
trying to cast off this idea of black women
as servants or in the servile industries
that the language like seamstress
had historically evoked for black women.
So I'm still trying to weave together
this fashion show piece, but I think
it's going to be really critical to the book--
this fashion as fundraiser piece.
I have about five minutes left.
I'm going to conclude here.
So my research assistant found this article
in the New York Amsterdam News, and when I saw it,
I cracked up, because does anybody
know what chitterlings are, or chitlins, as we call them?
So sell chitlin dinners to decorate lobby.
And Mollie's name is mentioned in this story,
and I'm like, whoa, OK.
Everything that they've tried to do to create
this image of glamor--
chitlins ain't that.
[LAUGHTER]
It's these pig intestine scraps that black folks have
turned into fine cuisine in our community.
Listen, for people who still eat pork,
when the chitlins hit the table during Thanksgiving,
this is a big deal.
My mom thinks she can make chitlins.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't eat pork no more, so I don't even
have to contend with that.
I don't have to tell her if she can or can't.
I don't think she probably can, though.
So to me, when I think about this idea of selling
chitlin dinners, this type of fundraising that we associate
with the black church--
when you have a building fund, it takes you 10 years,
and you still haven't built one new part of the building,
but it's funded off of these chicken dinners, and chitlin
dinners, and so on and so forth.
So the fact that they were using this language
to talk about society women I found interesting.
Now, if you look at the year here, this is 1973.
And so for me, I'm intrigued not just by the chitlins piece,
but by the year, because by '73 when
we're in this kind of height of the black power and soul era,
you have these socialite women who
are reclaiming these quaint southern culinary traditions.
And I thought this was really interesting, especially
after reading all this stuff and learning information
about all the top black women caterers who would
cater these private events.
I've learned so much about vintage champagne,
because that was the thing to have.
Everybody had vintage champagne.
Gordon Parks threw a party at his summer house
where he had 12 cases of vintage champagne,
and 100 pounds of barbecued chicken,
and so on and so forth.
So to see this piece that's dealing with--
that's talking about selling chitlin dinners
to decorate a lobby.
It's one of these coteries who probably came up
the ranks through the fashion shows that Molly hosted who's
trying to redecorate the lobby of her high rise apartments
in Harlem.
And so they're selling chitlin dinners as a way to do this.
And so I'm intrigued by this because I want to know,
is there another shift that happens in black society
life in the 1970s?
Where does this story go?
Because I feel like I'm starting to get a handle
on Mollie's generation, how they're
defining glamor, and high society, and black life,
and who gets to be in, and who isn't in.
But what happens when we get to that black power movement era
where there starts to be more pushback
against interracial activism, when
the critiques against capitalism and imperialism
reach this fever pitch?
I want to know what happens to Mollie and people of her ilk.
We know Mollie still continues to be
the president of the Urban League Guild
because she reigns for 50 years.
That is a long time.
I'm sorry.
Every time I hear that figure--
but I'm interested to see what changes, because--
I guess I do have two minutes.
I can say this.
The book end for me in terms of how I'm thinking about it now--
who knows what will happen when it actually
becomes a book project?
But Desiree Rogers, for me, is an important figure
that links the Mollie Moon era with this more present
and contemporary moment.
She's the first social secretary of the Obama administration,
and she's from New Orleans.
She's a self-proclaimed descendant of New Orleans
voodoo queen and socialite Marie Laveau,
but doesn't everybody say they're
the descendant of Marie Laveau?
Everybody says that, right?
But she's claiming there's a certain multigenerational tie
to hosting and being able to work closely with the most
powerful people in a society.
And so she's saying I come from a particular tradition
of fundraising.
And so before she becomes social secretary,
she gets the gig because of her uncanny ability
to raise money for Obama's 2008 campaign.
So this Harvard MBA hosted events
for Chicago's white and black business elite in her home
and used her training and marketing
to, quote unquote, "brand" Obama for the social media
generation, but her visibility also made her a target.
I don't know if you all remember that two reality TV
stars crashed the White House state dinner,
and Desiree Rogers is forced to fall on her sword and resign.
But part of the reason why I think
that she's forced to resign is because she's so visible.
Here's an article of her on the cover of Wall Street Journal.
Before we were thinking about Michelle Obama
as this fashionista and beauty image,
it was Desiree Rogers who was branding herself like this.
In true black society woman form,
she was using the media as a way to not only brand Obama,
but brand herself, and social secretaries
had never before done that.
How many social secretaries can you name?
But you can name her.
And she goes on after she's dismissed
to become the CEO of Johnson Publications.
So I think that is very interesting, because we've
seen how Mollie partnered with Johnson
Publications and the Ebony Fashion Fair
in the mid 20th century.
So this just shows how small this black elite community is.
So I'm trying to figure out, what
is this meaty middle tissue in the '70s, '80s,
and early '90s that gives us someone like a Desiree Rogers
and someone who still sees herself as very much wedded
to these traditions of socialite activism
and fundraising of her foremothers?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
For more infomation >> Täysin uusi Ford Focus Active – Esittely | Ford Finland - Duration: 1:26. 
For more infomation >> Police Chase Ends With Vehicle Wrapped Around Sign In Chadds Ford, .(February 7 2019 - Duration: 0:27. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét