As a rule of thumb, never assume anything in the world of paint correction. While most later model Fords may have paint that is on the harder side you can't always be 100% sure of that until you do a test section with your M-205/white pad. M-205 surprises me often in it's ability to reduce or eliminate swirls and lighter scratches.
What polisher will you be using and what other pads do you have besides the white and gray pads? As mentioned, claying is a very important step in any paint correction. You want to have your black paint (or any paint for that matter) 100% clean and free of any type of industrial/environmental fallout such as brake/rail dust, bird poo, tar, tree sap etc.etc. which on black paint will be hard if not impossible to see so you'll want to clay an area until you "feel" the clay glide very smoothly over the paint without any tic sounds or no feeling of anything rolling around on the paint underneath the clay. If there are any contaminates present on the paint after claying you'll likely yield less than desirable results working with black paint.
If there are a lot of contaminates present before claying you'll most assuredly inflict more scratches and or marring in the claying process and this in and of itself may change the way you'll need to approach your paint correction. I like to pre-soak the paint with my wash solution allowing a bit of dwell time to soften up or aid in the releasing of any contaminates before the initial wash to ensure that I am removing as much of the bonded contaminates in the initial wash process. The less contaminates you have to clay off/out of the paint the less damage you'll inflict in the claying process, the easier it will be to correct the paint and the less material will have to be removed to achieve your best results.
You may want to look into Iron-X as this will save you time and also save you from having brake/rail dust scratch up your paint in the claying process. This stuff is definitely $20 well spent on any paint correction.
Iron X Iron Remover, CQuartz IronX, Paint Cleaner, paint decontamination
Confused yet?
Simply put, the most critical steps (especially with black paint) will be the pre compounding preparation/cleaning steps. On black paint, nothing ensures failure as much as poor prep work which equals getting gritty contaminates imbedded in your compounding/polishing pad.
Going too aggressive with pad/product selection will also create a situation where you'll be doing more work than necessary to achieve your desired results and when you're doing more work than necessary, you're removing more paint than necessary so always start out with your least aggressive method first because you may just find that this is all that is needed to satisfy.
Good luck and have fun with it. TD