Hattie McDaniel

The years before film were full of invention and hard necessity. She toured with her brother's minstrel company, launched an all-female minstrel troupe with her sister Etta, and recorded blues sides for Okeh Records in Chicago. She was also, by contemporary accounts, the first Black woman to sing on radio in the United States — a fact that tends to get buried under everything else. When the Depression hit, she found work as a washroom attendant near Milwaukee. The club owner didn't want her on his stage. She got there anyway.

In Los Angeles, when film work dried up, she cleaned houses and took in laundry. Her brother Sam got her a spot on a radio program where she played a character called "Hi-Hat Hattie" — a maid who forgot her place. Her salary was so low that she had to keep working as an actual maid between broadcasts. The irony was not lost on her, and she carried it without complaint, or at least without audible complaint.

Film roles came, and with them a reputation for stealing scenes. A critic writing about her performance in Alice Adams noted that she grumbled over the menu, battled balky dining room doors, fought a flopping maid's cap, and chewed gum through a series of unappetizing courses — and that the dinner scene was one of the best-remembered moments in films of that era. She appeared in more than three hundred films, received screen credit for fewer than a third of them, and made nearly every one count.

The role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind was as contested as Scarlett O'Hara's. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to producer David O. Selznick lobbying for her own maid to get the part. Clark Gable reportedly pushed for McDaniel. She showed up to her audition in an authentic maid's uniform and won it outright.

She did not get to see the Atlanta premiere. Georgia's segregation laws kept her from the whites-only theater where the film opened in December 1939. Gable threatened to boycott in protest. She talked him out of it. That detail — her steadying him, absorbing the insult so the show could go on — says something about the particular weight she was expected to carry.

The criticism from within the Black community was real and not unreasonable. Some felt that by playing maids and mammies without protest, McDaniel was lending the Hollywood system a dignity it hadn't earned. She understood the argument. She also understood that she was supporting herself and her family, that she was the first Black woman to do what she was doing, and that the door she was pushing against had not been designed to open for her at all. "I'd rather play a maid than be one," she reportedly said — though the line cuts both ways, and she knew it.

No other Black woman won an Oscar for fifty years after that night at the Coconut Grove. When McDaniel died of breast cancer in October 1952, her final wish was to be buried at Hollywood Cemetery. The cemetery was segregated. She was denied.

She is buried at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service put her face on a stamp — the first Black Oscar winner to be honored that way. The gardenias in her hair, the plaque in her hands, the hotel that let her in as a favor: she held all of it with more grace than any of it deserved.