Hattie McDaniel

• Born: June 10, 1895
• Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
• Died: October 26, 1952
• Place of death: Woodland Hills, California

Actor and singer

McDaniel was the first African American actor to be nominated for or to win an Academy Award. Her triumph at a time of pervasive discrimination helped legitimize the contributions of black performers in the film industry.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment: minstrelsy; Entertainment: vaudeville; Film: acting; Radio and television

Early Life

Hattie McDaniel was born in Kansas in 1895, the thirteenth child of two formerly enslaved people, Henry and Susan McDaniel. She left high school at age fifteen to join her father’s minstrel show, for which she composed music, sang, and acted until the show went bankrupt. In 1920, she joined Professor George Morrison’s Melony Hounds, a Black vaudeville troupe. Singing with this ensemble, McDaniel became the first African American singer to perform live on a radio program intended for a general audience.

In 1929, McDaniel found herself out of work in Milwaukee and got a job as a washroom attendant at Club Madrid. Hearing her sing while working, the owner allowed her to audition and she became the first African American headliner at the club, performing as a featured act for two years.

In 1931, McDaniel’s brother Sam and sister Etta invited her to join them in Hollywood, where they were beginning film careers. Her first acting job was on the radio show The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour alongside her brother. The show was the first time she played a maid, Hi-Hat-Hattie, and she was an immediate success. However, the low salary required that she also work as an actual maid to make ends meet. In 1932, McDaniel landed her first film role, The Golden West, followed by 1933’s I’m No Angel with Mae West. This marked the beginning of her career in film.

Life’s Work

In 1934, McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild, the film actors union, and embarked on a long career in which she appeared in more than three hundred films. Eighty of these roles earned her credit in the cast list. She began her career playing a maid to a rich White woman and ended her career in the same role. She was so typecast that except for one or two films, McDaniel nearly always played a domestic in service to a White family. However, she was such a strong actor and natural comedian that she often stole the scenes from her more famous castmates. She fought to infuse her characters with intelligence and dignity, often serving as the voice of reason and morality in her films. McDaniel refused to portray these women as unintelligent or to embody offensive stereotypes.

Working throughout her career with Hollywood’s biggest stars, such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, andBette Davis, McDaniel formed lifelong friendships based on mutual admiration. Gable, a close friend, was known to attend all of her parties. In the 1943 film Judge Priest, she sang a duet with Will Rogers at his request; it was the first interracial duet in film history.

One of McDaniel’s most famous roles was in the 1936 film version of Show Boat, in which she played Queenie opposite Paul Robeson. Composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a new song for the film, specifically so that Robeson and McDaniel could sing an extra duet. The role for which McDaniel is most remembered, though, is Mammy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. This is the role for which she earned the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She not only was the first African American actor to win an Academy Award; she also was the first to be nominated. McDaniel gifted the plaque with which she was presented to Howard University, a historically Black institution, but it disappeared in the 1960s; in the 1990s, a descendant began petitioning the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a replacement, a request they eventually honored in 2023.

Although McDaniel broke ground for African American film actors, many prominent African Americans of her day thought that she was an embarrassment to her race. They implored her publicly to refuse to play maids and to stop encouraging stereotypes that limited the ways in which African Americans were portrayed onscreen. Many African Americans saw her as an “Uncle Tom” who was inadvertently holding back progress for African Americans. McDaniel always took exception to this characterization, claiming that every role a Black actor got made it easier for the next actor to work. She also maintained that her characters, although maids, were portrayed as decent and well-rounded individuals.

McDaniel devoted much of her life to charitable and African American causes. In the 1940s, McDaniel chaired the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee and took an African American troupe to entertain Black soldiers; Davis toured with them as the group’s only White member. In 1945, McDaniel helped spearhead the resistance to an attempt by white landowners to remove Black residents from Sugar Hill, a predominantly Black upper-middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. The area was home to many of Hollywood’s African American stars, including McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Ethel Waters. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that racial discrimination in housing was unconstitutional.

By the end of the 1940’s, McDaniel had fewer opportunities for film work because roles for maids were disappearing. She returned to radio, and in 1947, Beulah was the first radio show to star an African American. However, McDaniel only recorded three episodes before she contracted breast cancer and became too ill to continue working. Her friend Beavers took over the role. In 1952, Beulah was made into a television sitcom. McDaniel starred in two episodes and Beavers again took over the role.

McDaniel died on October 26, 1952. She left only ten thousand dollars in her will; much of her earnings had been used up during her illness or spent on charities and scholarships that she supported throughout her lifetime. Her will stated that she wanted to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery alongside many of her old friends; however, the cemetery did not allow African Americans, so McDaniel became the first African American to be buried at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. In 1999, the new owners of the Hollywood Cemetery built a memorial to McDaniel in an attempt to redress the racial slight.

Significance

McDaniel brought skill and dignity to her film roles throughout her career. Although her race kept her consigned to menial domestic parts, she was aware that she was a role model to up-and-coming Black actors and strove to give texture and intelligence to her characters. She wanted to show her race in the best possible light and create better opportunities for the next generation of performers.

Bibliography

Abrams, Jonathan. “Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home.” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/arts/hattie-mcdaniel-missing-oscar-howard.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2023. ‌

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. Continuum, 2001.

Haskell, Molly. Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited. Yale University Press, 2010.

Jackson, Carlton. Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel. Madison Books, 1993.

Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. HarperCollins, 2005.