After her performing career, Barnett was active in Chicago as a major philanthropist and civic activist, raising funds for and supporting cultural, social and church institutions.

[2] She also hosted a radio program in Chicago and represented the United States in several official delegations to nations in Africa.

Moten's family put great importance on education, as her parents made sure she was enrolled in good schools no matter where they moved.

[6] She then attended Western University, a historically black college (HBCU) in Quindaro, Kansas, where she studied music.

To pay her tuition, she joined a quartet on Topeka's WREN radio, performed on the Chautauqua circuit, and spent summers with the Jackson Jubilee Singers.

Moten performed "The Forgotten Man" from her movie Gold Diggers of 1933 for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his birthday celebration.

She did accept the role of Bess, but she would not sing the word "nigger", which Ira Gershwin subsequently removed from the libretto.

Claude, as the head of the Associated Negro Press, along with Etta and other members of the organization visited the continent frequently to gain African news information for the ANP to include in their issues.

[11] On March 6, 1957, Moten Barnett interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Accra, Ghana] where they were both attending the celebration of Ghana's independence from Great Britain—she as the wife of Claude Barnett, a prominent member of the official U.S. delegation headed by Vice President Richard Nixon, and King, fresh from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a man interested in the liberation of oppressed people globally, but with no official place in Ghana's Independence Day festivities.

In 1934, while living and working in New York, Moten married a second time, to Claude Albert Barnett, the head of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago.