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Hattie McDaniel
Actress
June 10, 1895 – October 26,1952
Inducted 2010
Adopted by Alumni and Friends of East High School
and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority
Portrait by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Film actress Hattie McDaniel was the first
African American to win an Oscar, for her supporting role as
Mammy in the 1939 film
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 I 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 1908, where
she won a drama contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU), and joined a local minstrel troop. She
left high school in 1910 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 1900s was a man’s world. But McDaniel
and her sister Etta Goff launched an innovative all-female “black-face” minstrel
show in 1914 called the McDaniel Sisters Company. In these early
shows, Hattie developed her trademark minstrel character: an assertive “Mammy” who
defied and critiqued racial and gender stereotypes of the era through
comedy, in the tradition of generations of African American performers
before her.
McDaniel gained stardom as lead singer in George Morrison’s
Melody Hounds, a popular Denver-based touring jazz orchestra. The
touring life brought her to Hollywood, California, where she launched
her film career as Mom Beck in The Little Colonel, starring the
child actress Shirley Temple.
In 1939, McDaniel landed her role as Mammy in Gone with the
Wind,
appearing with superstars Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Segregation
laws prevented her from attending the film’s premier in Atlanta,
Georgia, but later she proudly accepted her Academy Award as best
supporting actress for this role.
McDaniel appeared in more than 300 films and her own radio series,
Beulah. She shared her success by donating generously to educational
causes, including the National Association of Colored People (NAACP),
and scholarships for her sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho. She died in
1952. In 2006, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative
postage stamp in honor of Hattie McDaniel’s legendary life
and achievements.
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