On February 29th, 1940, Hattie McDaniel earned the Academy Award for best supporting actress becoming the first African American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
Yet on the night McDaniel became the first black American to be honored by the motion picture industry, she could not escape being reminded of how far the industry and the country had yet to go to overcome racism: McDaniel and her escort were required to sit at a segregated table, apart from both her Gone with the Wind colleagues and those in the motion picture industry.
The 12th Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in The Ambassador Hotel. When McDaniel arrived she was lead to a small table set against a far wall, where she took a seat with her escort, F.P. Yober, and her white agent, William Meiklejohn. With the hotel’s strict no-blacks policy, producer David O. Selznick had to call in a special favor just to have McDaniel allowed into the building (it was officially integrated by 1959, when the Unruh Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in California). (via)
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