This is a revealing and exciting biography about one
of the Civil Rights Movement’s unsung heroes.
I was really drawn to this book because I had heard of Mollie Moon but
didn’t know much about her life. And
what a life it was. Mollie Moon faced
sexism and racism head-on with a determination to fight. The epitome of genius and glamour, she
literally knew “everybody who was anybody.”
She traveled to Moscow with Langston Hughes, moved into the Black
political circles of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and forged ties to
Martin Luther King. Have you ever
wondered how the Civil Rights Movement was funded? A good portion of it was thanks to Moon, the
brilliant organizer of the Urban League’s Beaux Arts Costume Ball, which drew
together Black activists and some of the wealthiest and most politically
powerful white Americans.
Ford’s biography
is vibrant and an adventure that you don’t want to end.
An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball," the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years-a glamorous event rivalling today's Met Gala, drawing America's wealthy and cultured, both Black and white.
Our Secret Society brilliantly illuminates a little known yet highly significant aspect of the civil rights movement that has been long overlooked-the powerhouse fundraising effort that supported the movement-the luncheons, galas, cabarets, and traveling exhibitions attended by middle-class and working-class Black families, the Negro…
I appreciate how Myers takes the reader along on her
quest to tell this history, one that has been purposefully forgotten. Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman, was essentially the United States Second Lady between 1837 and 1841.
While other enslaved women were forced into
relationships with powerful white male politicians, Myers argues Chinn was
unique. Her enslaver, Richard Johnson,
who served as Martin Van Buren’s Vice President, openly acknowledged her as his wife. Johnson’s frequent absences from home, left
Chinn with the responsibility for his plantation, placing her in a position of
empowerment. But that privilege only
extended as far as Johnson’s property line.
Outside of the confines of the plantation, Chinn remained restrained by
Antebellum America’s brutal racism. I
found myself grieving for both her life and her death.
Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796-1833), the enslaved mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys. This meant that Chinn, while enslaved, had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world, including overseeing Blue…
Interior Chinatown is one of my all-time favorite
novels. It has a personal meaning for
me—through marriage I have ties to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and Yu captures
that community’s past and present so compellingly.
The book’s main character, Willis Wu, pursues
his dream of becoming a Hollywood leading man, navigating the complexities of
Chinese American life and the pressures of American racism. Through Willis’s struggles, Yu provides a
sharp expose of Hollywood and its stereotypes. By using the format of a script and, at points fusing reality with
fantasy, Yu’s narrative becomes intensively gripping and visual.
This book drops you into Willis Wu’s world
and you feel his frustrations, share his dreams, and experience his
hope.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and adeeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant,…
When Franklin
Delano Roosevelt won the Presidency in 1932, in the midst of the Great
Depression, most Black Americans lived in poverty and were denied citizenship
rights. As his New Deal was launched, a “Black Cabinet” evolved within his
administration and began documenting the inequalities faced by Black Americans.
Led by the dynamic educator Mary McLeod Bethune, they won victories—increased
Black access to economic relief, the incorporation of anti-discrimination
clauses into federal contracts, and the growth of Black educational
opportunities. But they also experienced defeats—they were unable to enact
anti-lynching legislation, end segregation, and extend voting rights. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition,
and with FDR’s death, it dissolved. But it had successfully laid the foundation
for the later Civil Rights Movement.
