Tanisha Ford Receives National Book Award for a Biography of Prominent Civil Rights Movement Fundraiser

Tanisha Ford, professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has been honored with the 2023 Hooks National Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis.

Dr. Ford’s book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power, Behind the Civil Rights Movement (Amistad, 2023), examines the social history of Mollie Moon, founding president of the National Urban League Guild, and her fundraising efforts to support the Civil Rights Movement. For five decades, Moon oversaw the Beaux Arts Ball, a social charity event inclusive to both upper-class and working-class Black and White Americans.

Dr. Ford’s scholarship centers on social movement history, Black feminist theory, material culture, Black visual culture, cultural economics, migration, and the craft of life writing. In addition to her most recent publication, she has authored several other award-winning books, including Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girls’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). She is currently working on a biography of sculptor and institution builder Augusta Savage.

Prior to her current role at the CUNY Graduate Center, Dr. Ford held teaching appointments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Delaware, and the University of Michigan. Outside of academia, she serves as co-founder and director of TEXTURES, a pop-up material culture lab, studying global Black migration through objects.

Dr. Ford received her Ph.D. in twentieth-century United States history from Indiana University.