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Hattie McDaniel was the 1st black to win an Oscar-for her role as the head slave in Gone With The Wind. As a black she was not allowed to attend the Oscars but through some wrangling by Clark Gable & David Selznick they got her there separate from the rest of the Oscar attendees.
Many whites did not want her there at the whites only Ambassador's Cocoanut Grove nightclub or like the idea that she had won in Oscar. But many blacks were not happy with her because she perpetuated racism with her role as the slave Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
She refused to say the N-word in her Mammy role but still was cast by the black public as perpetuating racism. She went on to play 74 maid roles and was derided by blacks for doing so. She famously said she would rather make $700 a day playing a maid than $7 a day being one.
In her acceptance speech The daughter of two former slaves said, "I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry.”
Even after death, her Oscar was deemed valueless by appraisers and later went missing from Howard university. And even in death there was controversy. Her final wish was to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery. As an all white cemetery, they refused.
Hattie McDaniel died October 26, 1952 of breast Cancer. Her belongings were valued at $10,336.47, $1,000 less than what she owed the IRS. The Oscar, she wrote, was to be left to Howard University, but the award went missing from the school during the early 1970s.
Her Oscar was deemed to have little value though today it would probably bring more than $1 million at auction. The low value is likely because it did not appear like how people think of Oscars. Lead roles got the statuette. Supporting roles got a smaller statue on a plaque.
Because of that it was likely not recognized as an Oscar by the appraiser. Also, being black in 1952 gave the Oscar less value. The institutional racism of the time is what put her in debt and left her there past death.
one theory that her Oscar was tossed into the Potomac River by "angry protesting students" after Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination. More white perpetuation of black on black wrongdoing. The last time anyone remembers seeing the Oscar was 1972.
The Academy claims since they don’t know whether Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar exists or not that they cannot replace it. When Olympia Dukakis's Moonstruck Oscar was stolen from her home in 1989, she called the Academy to see if it could be replaced. "For $78," they said. She agreed.
The thief called her son, asking for ransom money in exchange for getting the Oscar back. He called the police in return, and no exchange ever happened The Academy knew the Oscar existed yet replaced it anyway. I guess different rules for white Oscar winners.
Margaret O'Brien won an Academy Award for Outstanding Child Actress in 1945 for her performance in "Meet Me in St. Louis." In 1954, O'Brien's housekeeper took the Oscar home for cleaning. She never came back. The maid was fired, but the Oscar remained missing.
The Academy sent O'Brien a replacement, but the original remained lost. Forty years later, an attorney saw the Oscar in a flea market in Pasadena. They tried to sell it at an auction, but the Academy caught wind of the sale and asked them to sell it directly to them.
The Academy still has not replaced Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar. I even after many more Oscars have been replaced for white actors and producers, they don’t seem to want to replace them for a black actor -The first black actor Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel.
