When Fame Erases The Person

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I have never apologized for the roles I play. This week we're talking about Hattie McDaniel and how the role that made her famous came to obscure the woman who played it. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts, and I'm your host, Christina Rose. That was Hattie McDaniel in a 1947 essay for the Hollywood Reporter, seven years after becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award. By then, she had spent years defending the roles that made her famous. Hollywood kept casting her as a servant while critics argued that those portrayals harmed black Americans, and the name of her most celebrated character had followed her off the screen, Mammy. Before that name became attached to hers, Hattie had already lived a life worth knowing. What happens when the thing that makes you famous is also what makes it harder for people to see you? For Hattie McDaniel, recognition came with conditions. Other people had expectations about how she should work, whom she should represent, and what she owed to other black Americans. Those expectations did not always leave room for what she wanted for herself. And we are going to spend some time with those expectations. But first, we need to make room for Hattie herself. Long

Kansas Roots And A Family Stage

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before audiences knew her as Mammy, Hattie was Henry and Susan's daughter. Her father, Henry McDaniel, had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a religious singer. Both had been enslaved. Hattie was born in Wichita, Kansas on June 10th in either 1893 or 1895. Historical accounts disagree about the year. For Henry and Susan, freedom meant building a life after slavery, working, raising children, and making a home. That was the family Hattie was born into. She would grow up free with parents who knew what it meant not to be. After the family moved to Colorado and settled in Denver, Hattie grew up surrounded by music and joined in herself. Years later, she remembered her childhood singing and dancing with a joke about just how much her mother had heard. I knew that I could sing and dance. My mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop. I love how she tells the story of her early talent through the eyes of her mother who wanted her to just stop. As the mother of a daughter who was born singing, I can totally relate. And I think this quote in particular gives us an idea of how humble and funny Hattie was in real life. At Denver's East High School, Hattie continued singing, dancing, and taking part in drama. When she entered a recitation contest sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, she performed Convict Joe, a poem about the damage caused by alcohol abuse. Her performance brought the audience to its feet and earned her a gold medal. While Hattie was earning recognition at school, her father and brothers were making a living performing in a family minstrel show. She wanted to join them, but that meant leaving school and traveling for work. Her mother opposed the idea. Parts of Colorado were dangerous for black performers, and she wanted Hattie to continue her education. Despite her mother's objections, Hattie left school during her sophomore year and joined the family's entertainment business. The performing she had grown up doing was now becoming her livelihood.

Minstrelsy, Vaudeville, Radio, And Records

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I'm going to pause here to talk a little bit about minstrel shows because I think it's important to know that they were built around racist caricatures of black people, often performed by white people in blackface. Now, some black people did work in minstrel shows, but that was because there were very few other opportunities for them. And we're going to talk more about minstrel shows in next week's system episode. But the family also had its own stories to tell. In 1909, her brother Otis wrote Champion of the Freedman, a satire about schemes to send black Americans to Africa. Hattie performed in it. Alongside the conventions of minstrelcy, she was learning to perform political comedy written by her own brother. Performing meant more than having a good voice. She had to make an entrance, deliver a joke, and hold the audience's attention through the show. The family stage gave her experience in the work she would keep doing for years in front of different audiences. And many people referred to Hattie as a natural performer, but I want to be careful using that phrase because while it could be a praise, it could also overlook all the hard work that went into making something look easy. The work Hattie learned with her family continued in an act with her sister Etta. By 1916, they were appearing as the McDaniel sisters in a two-act comedy with a cast and music from George Morrison's orchestra. A review the next year described the laughter Hattie drew. Her work with Morrison continued when she toured with his orchestra on the Pantageous Vaudeville circuit. And her work with Morrison also took her onto the radio. In 1925, she performed with his orchestra on Denver's KOA. Audiences could now hear her on the radio as well as on stage. During the 1920s, she also took her singing into recording sessions, working with musicians including Lovey Austin and Tiny Parham. She recorded songs such as Boohoo Blues, I Wish I Had Somebody, and Just One Sorrowing Heart. And my personal favorite title, Any Kind of Man Would Be Better Than You. You can find all her songs online, but I'll put a link to this one in the show notes. But the main point of all of this is that before Hollywood associated her with Mammy, audiences already knew Hattie as a singer, comedian, and a stage performer.

Depression Years And The Milwaukee Break

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Success on stage did not necessarily mean stability between engagements. The Great Depression began in 1929 and unemployment was rising across the country. By early 1930, Hattie was in Milwaukee with the touring production of Showboat. The production was losing money and cut several cast members, including her. She was left without a job and with little money. I landed there broke, she recalled in her 1947 Hollywood Reporter essay. She heard about a job attending the ladies' restroom at Sam Pick's suburban inn and took it. The woman who had toured and made records was now earning her living serving the people who came out for an evening's entertainment. One night after midnight, when all the entertainers had left, the manager called for volunteer talent from among the help, she recalled. For two years, I starred in the floor show. And what I love about this story is that to the customers, it may seem like they just discovered her because for all they knew, she was the restroom attendant, a woman in a low-paying service job. But what they didn't know is that Hattie had already toured, made records, spent years performing. And when she asked the orchestra to play St. Louis Blues that night, she was returning to a job she already knew very well. And it kind of reminds me of this saying that I've heard before that's always kind of stuck with me is that success is when opportunity meets preparedness. And Hattie had been preparing for this opportunity for years. Her account describes a move from restroom work into the floor show. Hattie's account isn't the only record we have of her working life in Milwaukee. In the city's 1930 directory, she's listed as an actress. But if we look at a census entry from the same year, one that appears to be hers, the occupation is different. She's listed as a maid. Okay, so this is gonna reveal what a history nerd I am, but I was actually really excited to find these two documents. And I have to give a special shout out to librarian Anna from Milwaukee's Central Library, because she helped me find the page where um Hattie was listed in the City Directory. And I think together the City Directory and the census show the transition that Hattie was talking about because they were both dated in 1930, just as the Great Depression was really starting to hit. And Hattie described arriving in Milwaukee as an actress, but not being able to find work and having to turn to service jobs. And that's exactly what these documents show. One of them shows her listed as an actress, and the other one shows her listed as a maid. And um, I don't know, I'm just a history nerd, and I find it really cool that I found the actual primary documents that show that prove that this was true. So, okay, back to her story. Once she was performing at the inn, the customers began asking where she might go next. In that same Hollywood reporter essay, Hattie recalled, Sam Pick's patrons were nice to me, but they kept asking me one question that disturbed me why don't you go to Hollywood and get in the movies? The customers kept suggesting Hollywood.

Hi Hat Hattie Meets Hollywood

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Then in 1931, some friends of hers were driving to Los Angeles and persuaded her to come with them. Looking back on the city where she had found work and returned to performing, she wrote, Milwaukee was really my springboard to Hollywood. When Hattie arrived in Los Angeles in 1931, her brother Sam was already working on KNX's The Optimistic Donut Hour. I love that name. He helped her get a spot and she showed up ready to perform. According to biographical accounts, that meant an evening gown. Hattie expected the other performers to be dressed formally too. Instead, she found them in everyday clothes. The announcer dubbed her Hi Hat Hattie and the name stayed with her. Listeners came to know an outspoken maid who had plenty to say about the wealthy white people she worked for. Hattie could make the servant the one who knew better and let her employers be the ones who looked foolish. But getting into the movies didn't mean getting away from playing the help. By 1932, she was appearing in small film roles, including Another Servant in the Golden West. She had come to Los Angeles to build a career and she was finding work. But again and again, though, that work called for her to play somebody else's maid. Those small parts put Hattie alongside some of Hollywood's most recognizable performers. Through the 1930s, she worked in films including Judge Priest, Alice Adams, Showboat, Saratoga, and The Mad Miss Manton. Each appearance gave her limited time to establish a character where she was singing or playing comedy. In Alice Adams released in 1935, that meant helping turn a dinner into a disaster. Catherine Hepburn plays a young woman trying to impress a wealthy suitor. Her family hires a maid played by Hattie to help them appear more prosperous than they are. As the dinner goes wrong, the family's efforts to seem elegant become harder to hide. And I highly recommend you check out Alice Adams. Hattie's not in a lot of it. She's only in this one dinner scene part, but she's hilarious. The looks she gives them, the just her presence. Even when she's not talking, she's like the way she's acting and the way she's just carrying herself and side-eyeing them. She's just so funny. Three years later, Hattie was again playing a maid in the Mad Miss Manton. Film critic Robert K. Lightning draws attention to an exchange in which her character refuses to do what a guest wants. Hattie plays Hilda, a maid working for a wealthy social life. When a guest asks for another piece of cake, Hilda tells her there's more, but the kitchen is closed for the night. But I'll let you watch the scene yourself.

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Hilda, the door. I heard it. I ain't there. Sometimes I wish there was. Yes, I have, but the kitchen's closed for the night. Hilda, Miss Beverly is our guest. I didn't ask her.

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Another of her films makes that tension visible without a joke. In the shop worn angel released in 1938, McDaniel plays a maid who must deliver urgent information to her employer at a nightclub. When a white maider D tries to question her, she moves right past him and goes inside. The same film critic we mentioned before, Lightning, reads her entrance as an implicit challenge to racial exclusion, even though her reason for entering is still her service to the white character. And now these are acting choices. Actors can take a role and they can play them multiple ways. And she chose to play her roles this way. Every little thing she does is a choice, and every little thing she does is noticeable. And I think that explains why audiences were so drawn to her, even though she had such small roles in these movies.

Gone With The Wind's Mammy

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By the time Gone with the Wind arrived, she had already become skilled at making restricted characters memorable. But the film would give one of those characters an extraordinary reach. That audience had begun forming around Margaret Mitchell's novel. Published in 1936, it sold a million copies within six months. Producer David O. Selznick acquired the film rights, and by the time Hattie joined the adaptation, readers were already waiting to see the characters on screen. The role was Mammy, and Hattie was far from the only candidate. Actress Louise Beavers, already acclaimed for Imitation of Life in 1934, was widely considered a frontrunner. Another candidate was Elizabeth Lizzie McDuffie, who worked as a maid in the Roosevelt White House and had the support of the novel's author, Margaret Mitchell. Hattie won the part. And she helped shape it. According to Turner Classic Movies, Selznick ordered screenplay changes to complement her acting style. And we will explore the history of Mammy alongside the labels of Jezebel and Sapphire in next week's episode. Here, the question is: what happened when this particular character became attached to Hattie McDaniel's name? In Gone with the Wind, she plays an enslaved woman in the O'Hara household whose attention remains directed toward the white family. So I tried watching Gone with the Wind for the first time just for this episode. I had been avoiding it all my life, despite another teacher at my school showing up dressed as Scarlet O'Hara for Halloween and being shocked that I had never seen her favorite movie. It was so hard to get through. The sympathy toward the Confederacy, the blatant stereotypes of the black characters, the ridiculously evil portrayals of the Union soldiers, Scarlett's temper tantrums, and Clark Gable's consistently cocked eyebrow. Um, but I will say Hattie McDaniel's portrayal of Mammy was the only thing that got me through it, or most of it. I have to confess that I could not finish it. I tried so hard, but I could not finish it. Um, I did appreciate TCM's introduction, which warned viewers about the film's racism, but also explained why they still show it. But winning the role was one thing. Being called Mammy outside the film was another. Film scholar Victoria Sturtevant documents that Hattie was billed for personal appearances as Hattie, Mammy McDaniel. Fellow actors and spectators called her Mammy too. A 1940 press book emphasized her previous domestic work, encouraging audiences to connect the actress with the servant she played. One press release went further. It described her grandmother working on plantations like Terra, the O'Hara family's plantation, then imagined her grandmother being proud to see her granddaughter become, quote, the servant of quality folks. FYI, quality folks, meant the wealthy white plantation owners whose romanticized lives were built on the backs of slavery. And they're trying to say that Hattie's grandmother would be proud of Hattie for reenacting the service. Um, so this was supposed to promote Hattie's work as an actress, but instead, what it did was it reframed her entire professional achievement as a family tradition of loyal servitude and encouraged audiences to see Hattie as the real life version of Mammy. Okay, now imagine if we applied that standard consistently, like a publicity department trying to convince us that Tom Hanks' grandmother would be proud of him because they have a family tradition of talking to volleyballs. Okay, but joking aside, for Hattie, that publicity encouraged audiences to just disregard all of her training, her singing, her songwriting, um, and believed that she could play Mammy so well because she came from a family of mammies. And that's the damage. Audiences were encouraged to believe they knew Hattie because they knew her character. While

Critics, Walter White, And Survival

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the publicity encouraged audiences to associate Hattie with Mammy, black newspaper writers were examining the difference between her performance and the film's racial politics. Writing in the New York Amsterdam News, journalist Dan Burley praised McDaniel's performance while condemning Gone with the Wind's Racial Politics. A Chicago Defender Review called the film propaganda, pure propaganda, crude propaganda. For these critics, the issue went beyond whether Mammy was likable. It was what audiences were being encouraged to accept as history. An appealing portrayal of an enslaved woman devoted to the family that enslaved her could make slavery itself seem less brutal. The objections to the film appeared alongside celebrations of Hattie's achievement. When she won her Oscar in 1940, the California Eagle declared, Hattie McDaniel had hoisted the standing of Negro motion picture artists several notches as a result of Gone with the Wind. The Pittsburgh Courier also heard from readers who supported her recognition. Their letters made that support part of the newspaper record, alongside the objections to the film. Together, these reviews and letters showed the disagreement Hattie faced. Some people admired her and opposed the film, some defended her professional choices. Others thought those choices reinforced conditions that had to change. Hattie had to keep working while those arguments played out. But she was also standing inside an industry whose executives had far more power to change the available work than she did. NAACP's executive secretary, Walter White, believed that industry had to be confronted. He had spent years fighting racial violence and discrimination. He investigated lynchings and pressed for federal action. His concern about representation belonged to a larger struggle over black citizenship and safety. And if you're looking at his photo and wondering, Walter White was a black citizen. Black man who had fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. He had both black and white ancestry, but grew up in a black family and identified as black. And since I'm here, I might as well also make it clear that this is a different Walter White, not the drug dealing science teacher. White understood that popular stories could help maintain the prejudices civil rights advocates were trying to dismantle. Changing a law mattered. Changing what people accepted as normal mattered too. But the conflict between White and McDaniel became personal. PBS's historical account quotes White condemning I am disgusted at the sheer selfishness of actors like Hattie, White said, who just want to save their jobs without regard for the future of Negroes as a whole. He believed that preserving those jobs came at a cost to the future of black people collectively. McDaniel saw the immediate difficulty. Refusing a job did not create a different one. Her often repeated answer in the wording reproduced by PBS was When you ask me not to play the part, McDaniel fired back, what have you got to offer in return? I can be a maid for $7 a week, or I can play a maid for $700. While her answer was funny, it does show how limited her options were. An actress cannot pay rent with a role that nobody will write. Yet a community cannot secure equal treatment by accepting every image an employer is willing to offer. That's the complication within this disagreement. It is possible to understand why McDaniel defended her employment and why others wanted the roles to change. The problem is when we attack the actresses working within the limits instead of the decision makers who imposed those limits. Who selected the scripts? Who approved the budgets? Who decided whether black characters would be domestic workers, professionals, parents, lovers, or protagonists? It definitely wasn't Hattie. White did challenge studio executives and enlist influential allies, but his treatment of black actors alienated people who might have supported his campaign. And as PBS's documentary explains, studios began backing away from the demeaning roles without delivering the better parts they had promised. Black actors lost work. The available roles changed, but their opportunities did not expand. So it's kind of like they're saying, okay, well, you don't like these roles. Well, now you don't get any roles at all. Kind of like a mom to a kid that doesn't like his dinner. Now some roles did remain, but there was a lot fewer and not the change that they had promised. So, with so few alternatives available, Hattie kept explaining why she did the work. In her 1947 Hollywood Reporter essay, she compared herself with Arthur Treacher, the white actor known for playing butlers. People understood that he was acting, and she wanted the same distinction made for her. She also described persuading directors to eliminate dialect in contemporary pictures, changes she had tried to make within the parts she was given. So that comparison to treacher is valid up to a point. An actor should not have to share an identity with their character. But with treacher, the audience had a lot of other white characters they were exposed to. Treacher was in a movie amongst white doctors, adventurers, lawyers, parents, romantic leads. But because roles for black actors were so limited, their one role could carry a lot more weight. And unfairly, McDaniel was being asked to answer for a profession and an entire pattern of representation at the same time. And this is a difficult place to be in because even though they disagree, both sides are just looking to improve black lives. But by the time she wrote that defense, the criticism had already become personal. In 1945, readers' letters in the Chicago Defender and Baltimore Afro-American attacked her choices. Thelma Thomas, writing to the defender, objected to the sort of part Hattie played in Three as a Family. Other readers called her an Uncle Tom, an insult accusing a black person of seeking white approval at the expense of other black people. Meanwhile, defender columnist Al Monroe defended her acting. The argument was being conducted within the newspapers, not simply between a United Press and an isolated star. Her friend Ruby Goldwyn described how this impacted Hattie as a person. Quote, bitter years of loneliness and disillusionment when she thought her race did not appreciate her artistry. Now, that is a friend's account, and we need to keep it that way. We don't know what Hattie was thinking, but it does show us that public confidence and private hurt are not mutually exclusive. A person can defend a decision firmly in public, but still feel wounded inside by how other people understand it. Years

Segregation At The Premiere And Oscars

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before that 1947 defense, Hattie had also faced exclusion at the celebrations for Gone with the Wind. To understand the circumstances of her Oscar win, we need to return to the film's Atlanta premiere. In December 1939, Atlanta welcomed the white stars of Gone with the Wind with days of celebrations leading up to the premiere. There was a parade, a costume ball, and receptions. But under the South's Jim Crow segregation laws, the film's black actors, including Hattie, were excluded. Her co-star Clark Gable, who had actually recommended her for the mammy role, reportedly threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere when he learned she couldn't attend. Hattie persuaded him to go. He joined the celebration. She remained excluded. That segregation also determined who could watch the film. Black Atlantins were barred from the premiere at Lowe's Grand Theater. To see Hattie's performance in their own city, they had to wait until the film reached a black theater months later. So Gable ended up going, but I do wonder what would have happened if all the white stars had refused to go. Would that have worked? I feel like it's kind of comparable to the hashtag not all men thing. Correct, not all men are sexist, abusers, or rapists. But if you stand by and you do nothing while you know it's happening, does that make you complicit? And I'm actually curious to what you guys think about both the white cast not boycotting and the not all men situation since I brought it up. I'll make a post on Instagram so you can share your thoughts. Historical accounts do say that Selznick, the producer, wanted to compromise and at least include her in the program. But the organizers followed local advice to leave her out of both the festivities and the program. Less than three months after the Atlanta premiere, Hattie had another reason to join her castmates for a celebration. Her performance as Mammy had earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 12th Academy Awards. When it came time to present, actress Faye Bainter introduced the award by describing what this moment meant to her. I'm really especially happy that I'm chosen to present this particular plaque. To me, it seems more than just a plaque of gold. It opens the doors of this room, moves back the walls. Her words sound great. The only problem was the Academy Awards ceremony was held at the Ambassador Hotel's Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, and the hotel had a whites-only policy. Selznick had to arrange an exception for her to attend. So on February 29th, 1940, Hattie accepted her award, becoming the first black person to win an Oscar and made her very famous speech. I will link a video to her speech in the show notes so you can see it. But what you can't see in the video is when she returned to her seat, it was a separate table away from her white castmates in the far corner of the room. So when Bainter said they were going to open the doors and move back the walls, what she meant was they would move back the walls so they could put more black people at the back of the room. But I don't want to take away from Hattie's achievement. It took a lot of hard work for her to get there, and she absolutely deservingly made history. I'm just pointing out the irony of them patting themselves on the back for being inclusive while literally segregating the woman they were honoring. In her acceptance speech, Hattie spoke about her happiness and thanked the people who had chosen her. When she looked back on the win seven years later, she also remembered what it had meant to people beyond that room. In her 1947 Hollywood Reporter essay, she recalled, My own people were especially happy. They felt that in honoring me, Hollywood had honored the entire race. That was how she wanted the award to be received. She hoped young black people would see her achievement and find encouragement for their own futures. And here's where you might expect the story to change. She had an Oscar now. Surely that means getting better roles. It didn't.

Song Of The South And Beulah

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Six years after her Oscar win, Hattie was working in a major Disney production, but still looking after someone else's child. In Song of the South, released in 1946, she played Aunt Tempe, the nursemaid to a white boy named Johnny. His visit to a plantation brings him into contact with Uncle Remus, played by actor James Basket, whose stories appear as animated adventures. Disney promoted the 1946 Atlanta premiere with newspaper coverage, radio appearances, and a parade. But once again, the black cast members, including Hattie, were absent. Contemporary reporting identified Atlanta segregation as the reason they could not join the festivities. The film itself brought another familiar dispute. That year, Walter White issued the NAACP's objection that it presented a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Hattie defended her participation. She said that if she had considered the film harmful or degrading to black people, quote, I would not have appeared therein. The controversy did not stop the film from finding an audience. Its original release made a profit. At the 1948 Academy Awards, Zippity Doodah won Best Song, and Basket received an honorary Oscar for playing Uncle Remus. Disney kept bringing the film back to theaters. Its 1972 re-release became the company's highest-grossing re-release up to that time. So, how many of you were today years old when you found out that the song you were listening to while making goofy faces on Splash Mountain actually had racist roots? Well, Disney knew. And it took them up until 2020 to finally announce the changing of the log ride to honor Tiana, their first black princess, instead. 2020, that's 74 years since the premiere of the movie, for them to finally acknowledge that this ride was not, in their words, inclusive. Anyway, the point is that the Oscar changed nothing. In fact, the pattern with Gone with the Wind was practically exactly the same as with Song of the South. Criticized for her participation, forcing her to defend herself, and still denied participation in the premiere. And Hattie wasn't the only actress trying to build a career within these limits. Louise Beavers, who I mentioned before as one of the contenders for Mammy, had faced a similar pattern. Back in 1934, she had earned praise for imitation of life. As Delilah, a domestic worker and mother, she played a woman whose daughter rejected her so she could pass as white. Her performance moved columnist Jeremy Fiddler to call it the finest performance of 1934. When the industry failed to recognize her, he publicly challenged the racial prejudice behind that omission. But after that performance, Beavers returned to the servant parts made available to her. Just like Hattie, the praise had not brought a lasting change in the kinds of characters she was hired to play. And that comparison matters because it moves the conversation beyond Hattie's individual choices. Two actresses could demonstrate ability and still encounter the same narrow expectations. A successful performance could become the reason to offer another version of that same successful role instead of a chance to try something else. And we will never know the full range of what Hattie could have done if the parts were there for her. In 1947, Hattie returned to radio as Beula, the title character in a radio comedy. And what was Beulah? A maid. But before Hattie, Beulah was voiced by white men. First Marlon Hurt, then Bob Corley. And this is very familiar to what we covered in Anime Wong's story. Sometimes the rules were available, they were just given to white people instead. And if you want to hear an example of Bob Corley as a black maid, I'll put a link in the show notes. Despite all that, we should acknowledge what Beulah meant. When Hattie took over Beulah in 1947, she became the first black woman to star in a network radio program. She was still playing a maid, but now she was the lead. That was an achievement, even with the limitations of the role. As Beulah, Hattie could carry a story beyond a brief appearance in someone else's film. Beulah worked for the Henderson family, but she also had a boyfriend and a friend who was another domestic worker. Their relationships gave her people to talk to and problems to deal with outside her employers' lives. Listeners returned for those stories with Hattie's comedy at their center. She was drawing on the radio experience she had built before and during her film career. Yet the job at the center of her character's life was still domestic service. When Beulah reached television in 1950, actress Ethel Waters initially played the lead. Hattie later took a turn in the role, but declining health cut her television work short. Louise Beavers also played Beulah. The medium was changing while these actresses were still being asked to play a maid. And Hattie continued to defend the women she portrayed. One statement surfaced again at Howard University's 2023 commemoration when scholar Eleanor Trailer shared words she had found in her research. Quote, I portray the type of Negro woman who has worked honestly and proudly. So what did Hattie mean by that? She wasn't simply defending her right to take the job. Hattie believed there was a dignity in the women her roles represented. She saw them as capable, hardworking, authoritative, and resilient. Women who had held families and communities together under slavery and its aftermath. She even connected that generation of black women to figures like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. And for Hattie, service work had become part of her own working life. As we know, before she could earn a living as a performer, she had taken service jobs herself. So when she defended the dignity of domestic workers, she was speaking about work she knew firsthand. While her critics wanted Hollywood to offer black actors a wider range of lives to portray, Hattie wanted the woman she did portray to be treated with respect. Honoring those women and questioning Hollywood's version of them are things we can do at the same time.

Sugar Hill Housing Fight And Activism

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Off-screen, she was defending her own. She was living in Sugar Hill in the city's West Adams area when white property owners tried to force her and other black residents out. They turned to restrictions attached to the properties that barred black ownership and asked the courts to enforce them. Buying a home had not settled whether she could be allowed to stay. Hattie and her neighbors now had to defend their right to live in the houses they owned. The black homeowners hired attorney Lauren Miller to fight the case. In court, the dispute over their homes became a challenge to the racial restrictions themselves. The judge refused to enforce them, allowing the residents to stay. Reporting on the decision in 1945, Time quoted Judge Thurman Clark, quote, It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded without reservations and evasions the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment of the Federal Constitution. For Hattie, the decision meant she could keep her home. Time recorded her response, quote, words cannot express my appreciation. Hattie and her neighbors had faced the same threat and fought it together. Their victory kept them in Sugar Hill and became part of the wider efforts to stop courts from enforcing racial restrictions on housing. I think her involvement in this case is a good argument against the Uncle Tom accusations against her. That might have been what some viewers saw in her film characters, but as a person, Hattie didn't back away from a fight for her rights. During those same wartime years, Hattie was also using her work as an entertainer to support other black Americans. She chaired the black division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, organizing performances for black troops in the segregated military. Her community work also included raising money to help educate black youth. By the end of her life, illness had interrupted Hattie's performing career.

Death, The Missing Oscar, Legacy

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She passed away of breast cancer on October 26, 1952. She had already put her burial wishes in writing, naming Hollywood Cemetery, now called Hollywood Forever, where celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Judy Garland are buried. But the cemetery had a whites-only policy at the time, and her wishes were denied. She was buried at Angeles Rosedale instead, where coincidentally Anna Mae Wong is also buried. Decades later in 1999, Hollywood Forever offered to move her remains there. But this time it was her family who declined. They decided to keep her at Angeles Rosedale and accepted a memorial for Hattie at Hollywood Forever instead. Her will also specified where her Oscar should go, Howard University. After her death in 1952, the award was displayed in the university's drama department so students could see the award Hattie had earned. It was a plaque, the form given to supporting acting winners at the time. But by the late 1960s, its story becomes uncertain. There are theories out there of what happened to it, but none of them are proven. The fact is the plaque disappeared and what happened to it remains unknown. While the original remained missing, in 2023, the Academy and Academy Museum gave Howard a replacement plaque, restoring a physical reminder of Hattie's win to the university she had chosen. Students would once again be able to see an award bearing her name. Hattie wanted that Oscar displayed at Howard University where it could inspire black students. She had accepted that award while seated apart from her white colleagues, and now she wanted it to have a home at a black university where future professors. Performance could see what she had accomplished. And when I think about the damage that was done by the name Mammy, I think about what it encouraged people to stop asking. They stopped asking how she learned her craft. They stopped asking what other roles she wanted, what her humor sounded like outside a film, or what she did with the resources her work provided. A familiar image could take the place of curiosity. Even sympathy can be simplified. We can make her only the woman at the separate table, only the target of criticism, only the actress trapped by a role. And while those things matter, they do not contain her. Neither does the word first, as in first African American to win an Oscar or first African American to star in a network radio show. It tells us she crossed a boundary, but does not tell us how the boundary continued to shape her life after she crossed it. An honest account of Hattie's life has to hold the achievement and the restriction together. It has to credit the performance without adopting the film's history. It has to hear the critics without treating a black actress as though she ran the studio. And it has to acknowledge that the work helped reinforce an image whose consequences extended beyond her own career. And I think it's this complication that made the label of Mammy stick with her. Every time the culture remembered Hattie's achievement, it brought back the stereotype with it. Hattie couldn't reject Mammy without being asked, in effect, to reject the work that had gotten her the highest honor an actress can achieve. But now that we know her full story, the singer, the songwriter, the comedian, the actress, we can remember the child who made a joke about being paid to stop singing, the professional whose name appeared in a city directory, and the homeowner who helped defend her right to stay. We can allow her public confidence and the hurt described by her friend coexist in the same account. And we can return to the night she accepted her Oscar, hearing both the hope in her words and the extraordinary responsibility she was expected to carry.

Final Reflections And Listener Support

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Before we go, if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review, sharing it with someone you think might enjoy it, or supporting us through Buy Me a Coffee. That link and the link to my source list and photo attributes can be found in the show notes. And don't forget that we're on Instagram at vthhe.wbs.pod. And with that, I'll leave you with a quote from Hattie's Oscar speech in 1940.

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This is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of the awards. For your kindness, it has made me feel very, very humble. And I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel. And may I say thank you.

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This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week when we take a closer look at the labels Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire.