Hattie McDaniel becomes the first Black Oscar winner
On this day · 29 February 1940
On a Leap Day in 1940, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents walked to a Hollywood podium no Black performer had reached before.
On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, becoming the first African American ever to win an Academy Award. The win came at the 12th ceremony, held at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove in Los Angeles.
The triumph was wrapped in indignity. The hotel enforced a strict no-Black policy and admitted McDaniel only as a favor, seating her and her escort at a small table against a far wall, apart from her white co-stars.
She accepted the highest honor in her field from a room that would not fully let her into it.
Born in 1893 to parents who had been enslaved, McDaniel appeared in hundreds of films and was the first Black woman to sing on American radio. After her death in 1952, her Oscar plaque passed to Howard University. No other Black woman would win an acting Oscar for half a century, until Whoopi Goldberg in 1991.
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