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BLAZING A TRAIL
Hattie McDaniel wasn’t allowed to attend the Gone With the Wind premiere in Atlanta because of her race. Shortly afterward, she won an Oscar for her performance and earned an indelible place in movie history
Awards Extra Oscars Edition 1 2020 John Florio, Ouisie Shapiro
Eighty years ago, in 1940, the Academy Awards were held at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Hattie McDaniel, radiant in a rhinestone-studded blue evening gown, was relegated to a small table along a side wall, apart from Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and the rest of her Gone With the Wind castmates. The reason was as simple as it was outrageous: The hotel had a no-blacks policy. Months earlier, McDaniel had been excluded from the movie’s premiere in Atlanta for the same reason. If not for the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, having called in a favor, she wouldn’t have been permitted inside the Ambassador, either.
Upon receiving the Oscar for her role as the sassy maid, Mammy, McDaniel told the audience—which was all white, save for her escort, F.P. Yober— ” I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.”
Seventy years later, when Mo’Nique won an Oscar for her role in the movie Precious, she wore white gardenias in her hair, just as McDaniel had done. ” I want to thank Ms. Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to so that I would not have to,” she said when accepting the award.
Mo’Nique has kept a framed 8-by-10 photo of McDaniel in her closet ever since she started in the industry, and she remembers the evening as a shared victory: “I felt that that night my sister’s voice, my sister’s name, would be heard all over the world. I [hoped] that people would look her up and see her brilliance and her beauty and understand that she never got her just due.”
McDaniel couldn’t change Hollywood’s culture, but she did succeed in fighting racism in other ways. In the 1940s, she marshalled a group of black neighbors in a battle against segregated housing. The case, which she and her neighbors won, served as a precedent for the Supreme Court, which later struck down racially restrictive covenants, thus ending such discriminatory practices in Los Angeles.
As for her acting career, McDaniel continued to portray characters similar to Mammy. To black critics who condemned the roles she accepted, she said, “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.”
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Robert Groom
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