A few years ago, I read Harry Belafonte’s memoir, My Song. He tells an intriguing story about a phone call he received from a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), saying they needed the present-day equivalent of $500,000 to keep their Mississippi-based voter registration drive afloat. Belafonte and his wife Julie set about hosting in-home fundraisers attended by their wealthy friends to raise the cash. He collects $700,000. Belafonte enlists his best friend Sidney Poitier to board a small Cessna with him, to sneak a suitcase with the cash into Greenwood, Mississippi. The clandestine trip was successful, and SNCC can continue its work. My jaw dropped. I realized I knew nothing about how money was raised or by whom. And if I, a Civil Rights Movement historian, didn’t know this—and hadn’t even thought about it—the everyday American didn’t either.

Mollie Moon is a Mississippi-born activist who founded the National Urban League Guild in 1942. The Guild was the fundraising arm of the National Urban League. As the Civil Rights Movement intensified, Mollie established other guilds across the country. At the time of her death, in 1990, she was said to have raised more than $3 million for the National Urban League, spearheading countless voting rights, equal housing and labor campaigns. Her story was different from Belafonte’s, but they were connected in that they relied upon the same network of monied Black and white Americans. But Mollie did it with a level of glamor that I wanted to interrogate. She hosted galas and art shows. Who were these events for? What were the stakes for poor and working-class African Americans? I wanted to know all the things. I’ve devoted years to piecing together Mollie Moon’s story.

Our favorite stories about the movement grip us because they appeal to our learned belief that social movements erupt organically from seismic shifts in social and political life. In this formulation, money is an afterthought. But there is another, grimier story. Voter registration drives, freedom buses, breakfast programs, and legal campaigns cost cash. Where does the money come from? We have been reluctant to ask, because where there’s money, there’s the danger that someone has ‘sold out.’ Yet without a willingness to dive into this muck, we’re doomed to repeat the same inaccurate crisis funding narratives that have real implications on an array of economic policies. I want to tell a story of African American resistance and fiscal savvy. It is my hope that my book will persuade key white decision-makers that for truly anti-racist economic policies to succeed, they must cede some of their privilege.