Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to be awarded an Oscar ® for best supporting actress for her role in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. (Members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences vote every year on who should get an Oscar® as an award of excellence.) She was recognised as a talented actress by other actors but she was limited by having to play slaves and maids, especially ‘mammies’.

Both of her parents were slaves and had escaped. Coming from a poor family, performing was a way of earning money and she started singing in small town shows. She moved to Los Angeles and worked in radio and film playing many roles, and also starred in a successful radio series called Beulah towards the end of her acting career.

Gone with the Wind showed slavery in the American South as something that was good and showed enslaved people as if they were happy to have white masters. Hattie McDaniel was admired by African American audiences, because no matter how negative her roles were, they thought it was good that an African American was in the films. She often played characters who, even though they were servants or slaves, they also managed to be in charge. Despite her roles as a servant, she never allowed them to make her seem unequal and she always looked her white co-stars in the eye. In 1939, in some of the southern states of America, where black and white people were still segregated, there were complaints that she was shown as being too friendly with her white employers. She could not attend the premier of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta because of segregation and her portrait was taken out of the posters for the film. Hollywood gave an award to an African American, but it was rumoured that she was seated away from the rest of the cast at the Oscar ceremony.

Critics were divided in their opinions of McDaniel. Some said that the bossiness of her characters made people aware of the negative attitudes that women who were maids would have felt. Others were very unhappy about her roles and the stereotypes she seemed to depict. Hattie McDaniel herself answered her critics by saying:

“Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making seven dollars a week actually being one!”

Hattie McDaniel used her position to help many other black actors and artists and supported African American causes. Black actors like McDaniel struggled hard to be cast in the same types of roles as white actors. This is a struggle that continues but it was particularly hard in the 1930s. Hattie McDaniel died of cancer in 1952, aged 57, in hospital in California. Thousands of people went to her funeral in Hollywood.