06/14/2022
When Hattie McDaniel took the stage at the 12th Academy Awards in 1940, she was the only black woman in the room. The 46-year-old actress from Gone With the Wind was the first African-American nominated for an Oscar, but with the ceremony held at the segregated Ambassador Hotel, producer David O. Selznick had to petition for McDaniel to be allowed into the hotel’s glitzy Cocoanut Grove nightclub. While costars Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable sat together, McDaniel, wearing a blue gown and gardenias in her hair, was seated at a separate table with her date. After her name was announced as Best Supporting Actress, she rose to receive the plaque given to all supporting-actor winners at the time, eschewed the speech Selznick had prepared for her, and delivered one she’d written with the help of black writer Ruby Berkley Goodwin, a close friend. “It has made me feel very, very humble, and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may be able to do in the future,” she told the crowd. “I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.”
It was a historic moment, but it would take nearly a quarter century before Oscar crowned another black actor, when Sidney Poitier won for 1963’s Lilies of the Field. McDaniel’s own career floundered. Black audiences criticized her for perpetuating negative stereotypes, and white filmmakers cast her only in domestic-servant roles. “I’d rather play a maid than be a maid,” she famously told her critics, but by the time of her death in 1952, she was a polarizing figure, forever associated with Mammy, Scarlett O’Hara’s feisty house slave.
