Hooks Institute Book Award Event on Main Campus – Feb 5 at 6pm
The annual book award event for the Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change will be held on Wednesday, February 5, at 6pm in the Rose Theatre on main campus. This year’s winning book is “Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement” by Tanisha Ford. The event, which will feature a lecture by Professor Ford, is free and open to the public, but requires registration at hooksbookaward.eventbrite.com
The University’s Hooks Institute for Social Change furthers the mission of teaching, studying, and promoting civil rights and social change through research, education, and direct intervention programs. Since 2010, the Hooks National Book Award is presented annually to a non-fiction book that best furthers understanding of the civil rights movement and its legacy. The book is chosen by a committee that has included faculty from various institutions throughout Memphis, including for several years, Professor Kiel.
“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 press, and titans of industry.
Historian and cultural critic Tanisha C. Ford brings Mollie into focus as never before, charting her rise from Jim Crow Mississippi to doyenne of Manhattan and Harlem, where she became one of the most influential philanthropists of her time—a woman feared, resented, yet widely respected. She chronicles Mollie’s larger-than-life antics through exhaustive research, never-before-revealed letters, and dozens of interviews.
