McDaniel, Hattie (1895-1952)

Though Hattie McDaniel was a performer for most of her life, on stage, in film, and on radio and television, her career was largely defined by the racism of the culture she lived in and the limitations it placed on her achievements. White audiences who are familiar with McDaniel only from her oscar-winning role in Gone with the Wind, are probably unaware of the criticisms directed at her by other Blacks who were angry at those who perpetuated racist stereotypes. McDaniel, like many Black performers of the time, anxious to succeed in an industry controlled by whites, made a career out of taking the roles that were offered to her. In a Hollywood that, throughout the twentieth century, offered few genuinely complex roles for people of color, the roles available to large Black women in the 1930s and 1940s covered the narrow range from maid to mammy. Although Hattie McDaniel was a talented singer, dancer, and actress, she appeared in over 300 movies usually as a cook, a maid, or a mammy.

Though most of her roles involved playing southerners, McDaniel herself did not come from the South. She was born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised in the relatively liberal city of Denver, Colorado, where she attended an integrated school. The youngest of 13 children, McDaniel loved to perform from an early age. In 1910, her father started his own minstrel show, with two of her brothers as performers. McDaniel joined them soon after, and her career on stage began. She travelled with the show, singing, dancing, and writing songs for almost ten years. After the death of her father in 1922, she found a job on the new Denver radio station KOA, singing jazz songs with a band. She continued to work the vaudeville circuit until the 1930s, when jobs dried up with the arrival of the Great Depression.

McDaniel got another big break while working as a restroom attendant at the Club Madrid near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When the management needed a singer to fill in, customers recommended the talented woman they had heard singing to herself in the washroom, and McDaniel gained a new job. Finally, at the urging of her brothers, who had gone to find work in California, she moved to Los Angeles and began to look for work in the movies. She landed many small roles in movies, often not appearing in the credits. The pay was low, and McDaniel had to work as a maid while she was portraying maids in the movies. She continued to work hard at acting, learning a Southern accent she often used in her stereotypical Southern-maid roles, and she began to get more significant parts in larger movies. She received good reviews in a remake of Showboat, appearing with Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and Barbara Stanwyck.

It is her powerful performance as Scarlett's Mammy in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind (GWTW) that won McDaniel prominent status among white audiences. Though she made history by becoming the first Black woman ever to win an Oscar, (the second would be won by Whoopi Goldberg for her role in Ghost almost 50 years later), McDaniel's work on GWTW would forever be controversial. Though her performance was rightly rewarded as excellent, little was publicly made of the fact that the Black cast members had not been permitted to attend the feted premiere of the movie in segregationist Atlanta or that McDaniel was called Mammy by the cast even when not in character. Shortly after GWTW, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mounted a campaign to fight the racist stereotypes of Blacks in movies. "Mammyism" and "Uncle Tomism" were decried as harmful to Blacks as a whole, and actors such as Ethel Waters and Stepin Fetchit were attacked. As the most famous Mammy of the moment, Hattie McDaniel received the most hostile criticism of all.

Though McDaniel did go on to other "Mammy"-like roles in film and to Beulah, where she played a maid, first on radio, then on television, she defended herself against her critics. Together with other Black actors, she formed the Fair Play Committee to try to change Hollywood from within. McDaniel had been successful in having the word "nigger" removed from the screenplay of GWTW, and she refused to speak in dialect for Beulah. Many thought these victories too small, however, and the criticism from Blacks went very much to McDaniel's heart. This, combined with the pressure of problems in her fourth marriage, contributed to the actress's depression and health problems.

Hattie McDaniel died of breast cancer at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in California in 1952. Having recognized that in an oppressive society, there are few good choices for the oppressed, McDaniel had not refused to play the roles available for the black women of her time. If she had, it is likely a wide audience would have never heard of her. Although she was probably not a happy woman for most of her career, she was a strong one, having fought for the advancement of Black Americans in the way she could, by getting a job and doing it well.

—Tina Gianoulis

Further Reading:

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in America. New York, Viking Press, 1973.

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900-1942. New York, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Jackson, Carlton. Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel. Lanham, Maryland, Madison Books, 1990.