Hattie McDaniel

Hattie McDaniel was born on the tenth of June 1893 at Wichita, Kansas, the thirteenth and youngest child of Henry McDaniel — a formerly enslaved minister and Civil War veteran of the 122nd United States Colored Troops — and Susan Holbert McDaniel, a singer of religious music. The family moved to Fort Collins and then to Denver during her childhood, where she completed grade school and several years of the East Denver High School before leaving at fifteen to perform with her brothers' touring vaudeville company.

She performed across the segregated TOBA vaudeville circuit through the 1910s and 1920s as a comedienne and singer with the Melody Hounds, the principal Black female blues vocalist working out of Denver. She made her first commercial recording for Okeh Records in 1926 — the side "I Wish I Had Somebody" — making her one of the first Black women to record commercially. She moved to Los Angeles in 1931 in search of film work and supported herself as a household servant while breaking into Hollywood.

She acted in approximately three hundred films from 1932 — although she received screen credit for fewer than ninety. Her decisive role was Mammy in David O. Selznick's 1939 Gone With the Wind. She received for the role the 1940 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — the first African American to win an Academy Award in any category. She was required at the seventh annual Academy Award ceremony on the twenty-ninth of February 1940 to sit at a segregated table at the back of the Cocoanut Grove ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel under a Selznick-negotiated exception to the hotel's no-Blacks policy; she rose from her table to give the acceptance speech she had written across the preceding ten days.

She starred subsequently in The Great Lie (1941), In This Our Life (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944), played Beulah in the radio series The Beulah Show from 1947 — the first African American to star in a radio programme — and reprised the role for the television series from 1951.

She died of breast cancer at Woodland Hills, California, on the twenty-sixth of October 1952, at fifty-nine. She had specified in her will that she be buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery; the cemetery's then-management refused on grounds of race. She was buried instead at Rosedale Cemetery.

She is honored here as the first Black Academy Award winner.