McDaniel experienced racism and racial segregation throughout her career, and as a result, she was unable to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta because it was held in a whites-only theater.

[8][9][10] Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of gospel music, and her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War with the 122nd United States Colored Troops.

In 1910, she won a gold medal for reciting "Convict Joe", a Pre-Prohibition-era poem about the evils of alcohol, for a Women's Christian Temperance Union contest.

They lived for a short time at 32 Meade Street in Denver, until he died of pneumonia in 1915.She honed her songwriting skills while working with her brother Otis McDaniel's carnival company, a minstrel show.

[11] After the death of her brother Otis in November 1916, Hattie and Etta performed to full capacity crowds as The McDaniel Sisters and Their Merry Minstrel Maids in April and May 1917.

Fox Film Corporation put her under contract to appear in The Little Colonel (1935), with Shirley Temple, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore.

[43] McDaniel was a friend of many of Hollywood's most popular stars, including Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland, and Clark Gable.

She grumbles over the menu, battles balky dining room doors, fights a flopping maid's cap, chews gum, and shuffles her way through a series of unappetizing courses.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to film producer David O. Selznick to ask that her own maid, Elizabeth McDuffie, be given the part.

One source claimed that Clark Gable recommended that the role be given to McDaniel; in any case, she went to her audition dressed in an authentic maid's uniform and won the part.

[51] Most of Atlanta's 300,000 citizens crowded the route of the seven-mile (11 km) motorcade that carried the film's other stars and executives from the airport to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where they stayed.

[54] For her performance as the house servant who repeatedly scolds her owner's daughter, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), and scoffs at Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), McDaniel won the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Black actor to have been nominated and win an Oscar.

[68] In the Warner Bros. film In This Our Life (1942), starring Bette Davis and directed by John Huston, McDaniel once again played a domestic, but one who confronts racial issues when her son, a law student, is wrongly accused of manslaughter.

In his book Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle describes McDaniel as happily confiding to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1945 that she was pregnant.

[82] She married Larry Williams, an interior decorator, on June 11, 1949, in Yuma, Arizona, but divorced him in 1950 after testifying that their five months together had been marred by "arguing and fussing".

[83][84] During World War II, she served as chairman of the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, providing entertainment for soldiers stationed at military bases.

[89] When her Los Angeles neighbors in the Sugar Hill area tried to have black families evicted from their homes by suing to have race restrictive covenants enforced, McDaniel took a lead role.

[104] On September 26, 2023, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would replace McDaniel's Oscar, returning it to Howard University in a ceremony which was held on October 1, 2023.

Groups such as the NAACP complained that Hollywood stereotypes not only restricted black actors to servant roles but often portrayed them as lazy, dim-witted, satisfied with lowly positions, or violent.

They also argued that these portrayals were unfair as well as inaccurate and that, coupled with segregation and other forms of discrimination, such stereotypes were making it difficult for all black people, not only actors, to overcome racism and succeed in the entertainment industry.

[citation needed] McDaniel and other black actresses and actors feared that their roles would evaporate if the NAACP and other Hollywood critics complained too loudly.

[116] In 1994, actress and singer Karla Burns, the first black performer to win a Laurence Olivier Award, launched her one-woman show Hi-Hat-Hattie (written by Larry Parr), about McDaniel's life.

[109] In 2004 Rita Dove, the first black U.S. poet laureate, published her poem "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove" in The New Yorker[122] and has since presented it frequently during her poetry readings as well as on YouTube.

[129] Since the matter has become one of public discussion, in 1998 Howard University faced a barrage of negative press charging that it negligently "lost" the Oscar or, alternatively, allowed it to be stolen.

[132] Carter rejected claims that students had stolen the Oscar and thrown it in the Potomac River as wild speculation or fabrication that traded on long-perpetuated stereotypes of blacks.

She argued that the Oscar had likely been returned to Howard University's Channing Pollack Theater Collection between the spring of 1971 and the summer of 1973, or had possibly been boxed and stored in the drama department at that time.

[132] If neither the Oscar nor any paper trail of its ultimate destiny can be found at Howard today, she suggested, inadequate storage or record-keeping in a time of financial constraints and national turbulence may be blamed.

[90] Loren Miller, an attorney and the owner and publisher of the California Eagle newspaper, represented the minority homeowners in their restrictive covenant case.

[136] On December 17, 1945, Time magazine reported: Spacious, well-kept West Adams Heights still had the complacent look of the days when most of Los Angeles' aristocracy lived there. ...

His reason: "It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution.