Hattie McDaniel

Hattie McDaniel (born June 10, 1893 or 1895, Wichita, Kansas, U.S.—died October 26, 1952, Woodland Hills, California) was an American actress and singer who was the first African American to win an Academy Award. She received the honor for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Early life and career

McDaniel was born in Wichita, Kansas, to formerly enslaved parents, and she was raised in Colorado (in Fort Collins and Denver), where she early exhibited her musical and dramatic talent. She left school in 1910 to become a performer in several traveling minstrel groups, and she later became one of the first Black women to be broadcast over American radio.

With the onset of the Great Depression, however, little work was to be found for minstrel or vaudeville players, and to support herself McDaniel went to work as a bathroom attendant at Sam Pick’s club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Although the club as a rule hired only white performers, some of its patrons became aware of McDaniel’s vocal talents and encouraged the owner to make an exception. McDaniel performed at the club for more than a year until she left for Los Angeles, where her brother found her a small role on a local radio show, The Optimistic Do-Nuts. Known as Hi-Hat Hattie, she became the show’s main attraction.

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Hollywood debut and Oscar win

Two years after McDaniel’s film debut in 1932, she landed her first major part, as Aunt Dilsey, in John Ford’s Judge Priest (1934). The movie gave her the opportunity to sing a duet with humorist Will Rogers. She gained wider notice with The Little Colonel (1935), starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore, in which she was Mom Beck, a genial cook for a family in post-Civil War Kentucky. The role, and her decision to play it, drew criticism from civil rights leaders and others who were campaigning against caricatured, racist representations of Black people in Hollywood films.

“I can be a maid for $7 a week,” McDaniel reportedly said in response to such criticism, “or I can play a maid for $700 a week.” During the 1930s she played the role of maid or cook in nearly 40 films, including Alice Adams (1935), in which her comic characterization of a grumbling, far-from-submissive maid made the dinner party scene one of the best remembered from the film.

McDaniel is today most often associated with the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, a Civil War epic starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable that remained massively popular for three decades. McDaniel played Mammy, one of several enslaved people on the O’Hara plantation. She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for that role, becoming the first Black person to be nominated for, and to win, an Academy Award.

Ongoing controversy, The Beluah Show, and death

During World War II, McDaniel continued acting in Hollywood films, and she organized entertainment for Black troops. Her conflict with civil rights leaders and others seeking change in Hollywood—particularly Walter White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—also continued. She answered her critics in the Hollywood Reporter in 1947 by noting the progress the film industry had made in hiring Black actors and workers during her career and by rejecting the claim that Hollywood always typecast Black people. “I have never apologized for the roles I play,” she wrote, adding, “I believe my critics think the public more naïve than it actually is.”

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In 1947 McDaniel became the first African American to star in a weekly radio program aimed at a general audience when she agreed to play the role of a maid on The Beulah Show. In 1951, while filming the first six segments of a television version of the popular show, she had a heart attack. She recovered sufficiently to record a number of radio shows in 1952, but she died of breast cancer soon afterward.

When was Hattie McDaniel born?

In Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, a biography published in 2005, the scholar Jill Watts states that McDaniel was born on June 10, 1893, citing 1895 census records held by the Kansas Historical Society that list a Hattie McDaniel who was born in Wichita and is identified as two years old. “Hattie McDaniel later gave conflicting birth dates,” Watts acknowledges in a footnote. A descendant of McDaniel’s extended family, interviewed in 2022 by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, also says she was born in 1893. At the time of her death in 1952, however, McDaniel was widely reported as being 57 years old; her gravestone at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles also shows 1895 as her year of birth. A 1935 interview with The Call newspaper of Kansas City, Missouri, shows how McDaniel herself navigated the question of when she was born: “Although [her] parents are natives of the deep south, Hattie was born in Wichita, Kas., about 36 years ago,” the interviewer explained. “Like most women, she’s skittish about giving her exact age.”