Hattie McDaniel

1895-1952

By the mid-1920s, Hattie McDaniel became one of the first Black women to perform on radio. In 1934, she landed her onscreen break in the movie Judge Priest. She then became the first Black person to win an Oscar in 1940, for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. In 1947, after her career took a downturn, she began starring on CBS radio’s The Beulah Show. She was diagnosed with breast cancer toward the end of her life and died in 1952 at age 57.

FULL NAME: Hattie McDaniel
BORN: June 10, 1895
DIED: October 26, 1952
BIRTHPLACE: Wichita, Kansas
SPOUSES: Howard Hickman (1911-1915), George Langford (1922), James Lloyd Crawford (1941-1945), and Larry C. Williams (1949-1950)
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, with some sources listing her year of birth as 1893. She was her parents’ 13^th child. Her father, Henry, was a Civil War veteran who suffered greatly from war injuries and had a difficult time with manual labor. (Henry was later described by one of his sons as a minister, though this was a fictionalized account.) Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a domestic worker.

In 1901, McDaniel and her family moved to Denver. In Colorado, she attended the 24^th Street Elementary School, where she was one of only two Black students in her class. Her natural flair for singing—in church, at school, and in her home—was apparent early on and gained her popularity among her classmates.

While at Denver East High School, McDaniel started professionally singing, dancing, and performing skits in shows as part of The Mighty Minstrels. In 1909, she decided to drop out of school to more fully focus on her fledgling career, performing with her older brother’s troupe. In 1911, she married pianist Howard Hickman and went on to organize an all-women’s minstrel show.

In the 1920s, McDaniel worked with Professor George Morrison’s orchestra and toured with his and other vaudeville troops for several years. By mid-decade, she was invited to perform on Denver’s KOA radio station.

Following her radio performance, McDaniel continued to work the vaudeville circuit and established herself as a blues artist, writing her own work. When projects weren’t coming in, she took on attendant work to supplement her income. Much to her relief, in 1929, she landed a steady gig as a vocalist at Sam Pick’s Suburban Inn in Milwaukee.

A year or so later, McDaniel’s brother Sam and sister Etta convinced her to move to Los Angeles, where they had managed to procure minor movie roles for themselves. Sam was also a regular on a KNX radio show called The Optimistic Do-Nuts. Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, McDaniel had a chance to appear on her brother’s program. She was a quick hit with listeners and was dubbed “Hi Hat Hattie” for donning formal wear during her first KNX performance.

In 1931, McDaniel scored her first small movie role as an extra in a Hollywood musical. Then in 1932, she was featured as a housekeeper in The Golden West. McDaniel continued to land parts here and there, but as roles for Black actors were hard to come by, she was again forced to take odd jobs to make ends meet.

McDaniel landed a major onscreen role in 1934, singing a duet with Will Rogers in John Ford’s Judge Priest. The following year, she was awarded the role of Mom Beck, starring opposite Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore in The Little Colonel. The part gained McDaniel the attention of Hollywood directors and was followed by a steady stream of offers, including the part of Queenie in the 1936 film adaptation of Showboat, with Irene Dunne. (McDaniel had previously toured with the stage version of the Kern and Hammerstein musical as well.)

In 1939, McDaniel was widely seen in the movie that marked the highlight of her entertainment career. As Mammy, the house servant of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivian Leigh) in Gone With the Wind, McDaniel earned the 1940 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress—becoming the first Black American to win an Oscar. Yet all of the movie’s Black actors, including McDaniel, were barred from attending the film’s premiere in 1939, aired at the Loew’s Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta.

Even as the role of Mammy ensured McDaniel’s place in the history books, it courted controversy as well. Since playing Mom Beck in The Little Colonel, McDaniel had been attacked by the Black media for taking parts that perpetuated a negative stereotype of her race; she was criticized for playing servants and slaves who were seemingly content to retain their role as such.

Walter White, then head of the NAACP, pleaded with Black actors to stop accepting such stereotypical parts, as he believed they degraded the African American community. He also urged movie studios to start creating roles that portrayed Black people as capable of achieving far more than cooking and cleaning for white people.

In her defense, McDaniel responded by asserting her prerogative to accept whatever roles she chose. She also suggested that characters like Mammy proved themselves as more than just measuring up to their employers.

During World War II, McDaniel helped entertain American troops and promoted the sale of war bonds, and she soon found movie offers were drying up. She responded by making a strategic return to radio, taking over the starring role on CBS radio’s The Beulah Show in 1947.

In 1951, McDaniel started filming for the television version of The Beulah Show. Unexpectedly, she suffered a heart attack around the same time and was forced to abandon her career upon being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Ultimately, her breast cancer was fatal. McDaniel died on October 26, 1952, in Los Angeles. She was 57 years old. 

After her death, the groundbreaking actor was posthumously awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975 and honored with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp in 2006.

A well-received biography on her life, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood by Jill Watts, was published in 2005. A 2018 effort by producer Alysia Allen to adapt the book into a movie stalled out as did an indie film with Raven Goodman attached to star.

The most notable onscreen retelling of McDaniel’s life arrived in the 2001 documentary Beyond Tara, The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel. Whoopi Goldberg hosted and narrated the project. In 2020, Queen Latifah portrayed McDaniel in the Netflix limited series Hollywood, which incorporated historical figures and events into a show about aspiring actors trying to make it in Hollywood’s golden age.

• Hell, I’d rather play a maid than be one.
• I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.
• When I was 8 years old, I knew what I was going to be: an actress.

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