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Hattie McDaniel and her Oscar

A black and white photo of Hattie McDaniel. She is a Black woman with hair tied back in a bun. Text reads 'Hattie McDaniel wins an Oscar - 29 February 1940"

On the leap day in 1940, Hattie McDaniel made history as the first person of colour to both attend the Oscars ceremony and to win one. Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar’s own history reflects her complicated place in history: side-lined by the White Hollywood establishment and challenged by radical Black activism.

One night in the Cocoanut Grove

The 1939 Academy of Motion Picture and Arts Awards, the Oscars, was held in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 29 February 1940.

The Cocoanut Grove was one of the places to be in Hollywood at the time: Marion Davies allegedly rode a white horse through the hotel lobby to get to a costume party there. It was spoofed in a Merrie Melodies cartoon, The CooCoo Nut Grove (1936, dir. Freleng).  If you think the modern maximalist interior design style is a bit bling then the Grove makes it look austere. They had salvaged papier-mâché palm trees from the 1921 Valentino film The Sheik. They had life-sized mechanical monkeys with glowing eyes lurking in the trees. They had a running waterfall, lit by an artificial moon.

And they had racial segregation. No Black people were allowed to patronise the Grove or the wider hotel.

The audience applauded McDaniel as she walked into the Grove for the Oscars. Then she was escorted to a small table at the back, set apart from the rest of the attendees. This was the hotel’s concession. Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick  had wrangled this seating arrangement from the hotel when McDaniel was nominated – at his suggestion – for Best Supporting Actress. She and her plus one, Ferdinand Yober, could attend but could not sit with the rest of the party.

This is the context for the rather patronising presentation by Fay Bainter, and McDaniel’s acceptance speech.

After applauding her win, the rest of the Gone With the Wind group went to an after-party. In another Whites-only club.

The whole evening was an illustration of the racism McDaniel faced every day in her chosen career. But her approach to surviving in a racist culture drew criticism from Black audiences and activists.

The double-bind of McDaniel’s career

“Despite her success, to many in white America, their beloved “Hattie,” was beloved because she did not rock the Hollywood racial boat.”

W Burlette Carter, Finding the Oscar

McDaniel is now best remembered for her roles as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Fleming), and Aunt Tempy in Song of the South (1946, dir. Foster and Jackson). Both films are racist, perpetuating white supremacist ideas of Black people. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rightly criticised them. They also criticised McDaniel personally for taking the roles in them.

McDaniel felt this was unfair. She had started out on the stage with her brothers, before launching her own all-woman minstrel show in 1914. In that, she had written her own songs, subverting the White minstrel show stereotype of the Mammy. When she got to Hollywood she already had a name as a blues singer, and was one of the first Black woman to appear on the radio, but she took on bit parts as maids in films because it paid the bills. Her quote about preferring to play a maid than be one makes more sense when you see she was born in poverty and was taking the parts during the Great Depression.

By the 1930s, 20 years into her career, she had turned the subservient Mammy from the White minstrel shows of her childhood into a long-suffering woman rolling her eyes at the antics of a white heroine.

Gone With the Wind (1939) is a huge problem though. The book is deeply racist and contains white supremacist ideas and derogatory language. It reinforces the Lost Cause of the Confederacy mythology that still haunts American culture and politics. There’s no “things were different back in the day” excuse for it because it was widely criticised at the time. Walter White and NAACP, learning of Selznick’s adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel, asked the producer to hire a Black adviser on it. Selznick instead picked a White woman to advise the Black actors on how to play the enslaved characters. Hattie said, but only in the Black press, that she hoped to imbue Mammy with spirit of Harriet Tubman, and the mothers of Booker T Washington and George Washington Carver.

After Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win, she was seen as part of Hollywood’s use of negative racist stereotypes about Black people. Not least because she vigorously defended her choice to take both the roles and the money. Her film career stalled and she was increasingly out of step with the Civil Rights movement.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1952 McDaniel wrote a will asking to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery. After her death in 1954, the cemetery refused to accept her, as they did not allow Black people to be buried there.

The Legacy of Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar

In her will, McDaniel also asked for her Oscar to be donated to Howard University after her death. The state appraiser, valuing her estate in 1954, wrote the Oscar had “no value”. McDaniel had died in debt, so the specific requests in her will were sold instead of passed on. W Burlette Carter’s investigation, Finding the Oscar, suggests the Oscar was sold as part of a job lot. It eventually arrived at Howard, as McDaniel originally wished, in 1961.

And then, ten years later, it had vanished.

Rumours and speculation abounded. It had been stolen, it had been lost, it had been thrown in the river by a student angry about her collusion with racist Hollywood. Carter’s investigation into what really happened to it is meticulous and worth a read. When the Academy opened their own museum in Los Angeles in September 2021, they put in an empty display case for McDaniel’s Oscar to prompt conversations about erasure from history.

On 1 October 2023, the Academy finally presented a reproduction of McDaniel’s Oscar to the Chadwick A Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard. You can watch Howard’s celebration, called Hattie ‘s Come Home, on their website: https://finearts.howard.edu/

Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar is an object that provides a way of exploring the history of Black women’s participation in, and exclusion from, Hollywood.

Discovering McDaniel

We are not experts on the history and complexities of race in Hollywood because we’re White and British. This article has been drawn from a range of sources, listed in Sources. In particular, we’d encourage you to explore the following to discover more about Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar and legacy:

We’ve also welcomed recommendations and corrections from American cultural historian Dr. Tiffany Knoell, Bowling Green State University. Her advice has been invaluable: any errors in this post are solely our own.

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Sources