History of hattie mcdaniel

Film actress Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar, for her supporting role as Mammy in the bio Gone with the Wind. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, the youngest daughter of Susan Holbert and Henry McDaniel, an ex-slave and Civil War veteran. Hattie decided to become an actress at age six. “I knew that inom could sing and dance . . . my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop,” she recalled. Singing, dancing, and acting would become her pathway out of a life of poverty. McDaniel enrolled in Denver’s East High School , where she won a skådespel contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and joined a local minstrel troop. She left high school in to join her brother Otis McDaniel’s new carnival company, touring small towns throughout Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. To make ends meet, she took jobs as a maid and laundress. Show business in the early s was a man’s world. But McDaniel and her sister Etta Goff launched

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Hattie McDaniel ( - )

By , Hattie’s father Henry and her brothers Otis and Sam had a change in careers. Henry formed his own minstrel show with Otis and Sam. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, minstrel shows had become a popular form of entertainment among white audiences. The shows focused on racist stereotypes of African Americans performed by white singers and comedians with their faces painted black for laughs. This type of performance was called “blackface.” While these shows promoted racist ideas that thrived across the country, minstrel shows were one of the few places where African American artists could highlight dance and musical styles that grew out of their communities, such as Ragtime and Jazz. Hattie’s mother forbade her from joining the family show, because her father and brothers traveled around the state, and many remote parts of Colorado were not safe places for African Americans to travel and stay.

Hattie would not be dissuaded from her desire to perform,

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On February 29, , Hattie McDaniel made history when she became the first Black person to win an Academy Award, for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. As she stood in front of her white peers at the Cocoanut Grove, she was the picture of pride and joy. “I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry,” she said, crying. “My heart is too full to tell you how I feel.”

But as biographer Jill Watts notes in the masterful Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, that same evening, McDaniel was seated at the edge of the room, close to the stage but separate from her colleagues. For McDaniel, life was a tightrope walk of trying to satisfy herself, her prejudiced bosses, and the representation-starved Black community—attempting to be all things to all people. “I always wanted to be before the public,” she once said, per Watts. “I’m always acting. I guess it’s the ham in me.”

Married four times, McDaniel was “alive to her fing