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Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1895 in Wichita, Kansas, the thirteenth child in a family of performers. Her father, Henry McDaniel, led a varied life as a Baptist minister, carpenter, banjo player, and minstrel showman. Her mother was a gospel singer named Susan Holbert. In 1901 their growing family moved to Denver, Colorado.
McDaniel attended elementary school in Denver. She was one of only two black children in her class. Racial prejudice was less virulent in the West than elsewhere in the United States, and she became something of a favorite at the 24th Street Elementary School for her talents as a singer and reciter of poetry. She was also singing in professional minstrel shows, as well as dancing, performing humorous skits, and later writing her own songs. In 1910 she left school in her sophomore year and became a full-time minstrel performer.
McDaniel travelled the western states with her father's Minstrel Show and several other troupes. The minstrel shows, usually performed by blacks but sometimes by whites in blackface, presented a variety of entertainments based on caricatures of black cultural life for the enjoyment of mostly white audiences. With her father's troupe, which also featured a number of her brothers and sisters, she visited most of the major cities in the western United States while honing the skills that would later make her famous. When her father retired around 1920, McDaniel joined Professor George Morrison's famous "Melody Hounds" on longer and more publicized tours. She also wrote dozens of show tunes such as "Sam Henry Blues, " "Poor Wandering Boy Blues, " and "Quittin' My Man Today. "
In the 1920s McDaniel toured constantly with Morrison's troupe and other well-known vaudeville companies. The progress of her career included a first radio performance in 1925 on Denver's KOA station. In 1929 the booking organization for whom she was working went bankrupt at the onset of the Great Depression, stranding McDaniel in Chicago with little money and no job. On a tip from a friend, she went north to Milwaukee and found work at Sam Pick's Club Madrid as a bathroom attendant. At that time, the Club Madrid engaged only white nightclub performers and had no use for a black minstrel/vaudeville entertainer such as Hattie McDaniel.
True to her nature, however, McDaniel could not refrain from singing while she worked, and she became well known among the club's patrons for her unfailing good humor and obvious talent. After repeated promptings from her fans, the club's owner gave her a shot at performing on his main stage, where her rendition of "St. Louis Blues" was a smash hit. She remained as a performer at the Club Madrid for about a year, until she was lured to Hollywood by the enthusiastic reports of her brother Sam and sister Etta, who had been living in Los Angeles for several years. Sam and Etta McDaniel already had small roles in a number of motion pictures, but Hattie was forced to take menial jobs in order to support herself in Los Angeles.
Opportunities for blacks in Hollywood were severely limited to a handful of stereotypic roles, and even these parts were hard to come by. Sam McDaniel had a regular part on LA's KNX radio show "The Optimistic Do-Nuts" and was able to get Hattie a small part, which she promptly turned into a big opportunity. She earned the nickname "Hi-Hat Hattie" after showing up for the first radio broadcast in formal evening wear. McDaniel landed her first movie role in 1931 as an extra in the chorus scenes of a routine Hollywood musical. The next year she played in her first major motion picture – the Twentieth Century Fox film The Golden West – as a house servant.
McDaniel continued to appear in a number of similar bit parts, receiving screen credit for none of them, until famed director John Ford cast her in the 1934 Fox production of Judge Priest. In this picture, McDaniel was given the opportunity to sing a duet with Will Rogers, the well-known American humorist, and her performance was well received by the press and her fellow actors alike. In 1935 McDaniel played "Mom Beck" in The Little Colonel, which starred Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore, faithfully reflected the image then held by many white Americans of the happy black servant in the Old South. A number of black journalists objected to Hattie's performance in the film, charging that the character of Mom Beck implied that blacks might have been happier as slaves than they were as free individuals. This movie marked the beginning of McDaniel's long feud with the more progressive elements of the black community.
Once established in Hollywood, McDaniel found no shortage of work. In 1936 alone she appeared in twelve films, including the Universal release Show Boat, starring Paul Robeson. For the decade as a whole, her performances numbered about forty – nearly all of them in the role of maid or cook to a household of whites. As such, she was a leading candidate for the role of Mammy in David O. Selznick's 1939 production of Gone with the Wind, adapted from Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel of the same name. Gone with the Wind was dead certain to be a hugely successful film, and competition for parts was intense in Hollywood.
McDaniel won the role of Mammy over several rivals, signing a contract with Selznick that gave him exclusive rights to her work for a number of years. Her salary for Gone with the Wind was to be $450 a week, which was nevertheless a long way from what her real-life counterparts could hope to earn. Gone with the Wind rewarded her with far more than a weekly salary, however. As the loving but occasionally sharp-tongued Mammy, Hattie McDaniel became known and loved by the millions of people who would eventually see the movie, one of Hollywood's all-time hits.
In contrast to the widespread criticism she had received for some of her earlier roles, McDaniel's award-winning performance was generally seen by the black press as a symbol of progress for African Americans, although some members of the NAACP were still displeased with her work. Gone with the Wind lifted McDaniel to the ranks of known film personalities and was unquestionably the high point of her career. In the wake of the film's great success, she spent much of 1940 touring the country as Mammy, and in the following year she appeared in three substantial film roles, earning no less than $31, 000 for her efforts.
Released from her contract with Selznick in 1943, McDaniel became a free agent in the Hollywood markets. During World War II, she worked with the Hollywood Victory Committee, entertaining black troops and encouraging Americans to buy war bonds. At about the time the war ended, the actress found herself embroiled in a legal battle over a restrictive covenant system in Los Angeles, which limited black land and home ownership rights. Having purchased a thirty-room house in the city back in 1942, McDaniel faced the possibility of eviction if the discriminatory restrictive covenant were enforced. She was one of several black entertainers who challenged the racist system in court, however, and won.
Still, throughout the 1940s, a growing number of activists viewed McDaniel and all she represented as a detriment to the budding fight for civil rights. By the end of the war, the United States had entered a new phase in the struggle for equality between the races. Minstrel shows and the stereotyped roles heretofore allowed blacks were no longer acceptable to a growing community of intellectuals and activists who demanded that films represent people of color as capable of greater accomplishments than those of cook, servant, and shoe shine boy. NAACP president Walter White pressed both actors and studios to stop making films which tended to degrade blacks, and he singled out the roles of Hattie McDaniel as particularly offensive.
By the late 1940s McDaniel found herself in a difficult position. She was nationally famous and loved as the personification of the hard-working, humble black servant yet was under attack for playing that character by many members of the black community; and, perhaps most difficult of all, such roles were disappearing in the changing racial climate of post-World War II America. Inevitably, McDaniel found her screen opportunities drying up even as she suffered insults from progressive blacks, and she became increasingly depressed and confused as to her proper path.
Although her screen image was permanently linked to a now outdated stereotype, McDaniel could still use her vocal talent on radio. In 1947 she won the starring role of Beulah on The Beulah Show, a CBS radio show about a black maid and the white family for whom she worked. Beulah was an ideal role for the actress, allowing her to make use of her considerable comedic gifts while not being limited to a crude racial cliche. Moreover, the program was generally praised by the NAACP and the Urban League, along with the twenty million other Americans who listened to it every evening at the height of its popularity in 1950.
In 1951 McDaniel suffered a heart attack while filming the first few segments of a projected television version of The Beulah Show. Although she recovered enough to tape more than an dozen episodes of the Beulah radio show in the spring of 1952, by summer she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died on October 26, 1952.
McDaniel enjoyed a long and prosperous career in film and radio drama. She was one of the first black women to be heard on American radio, the medium in which she would always remain most comfortable. She will always be remembered as Mammy of Gone with the Wind, a role that many critics find offensive, many others prize as the movie's finest performance, and all agree could have been played by no one but Hattie McDaniel. Her performance as Mammy was more than a bit part, and it so impressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that she was awarded the 1940 Oscar for best supporting actress, the first ever won by an African American. When Hattie McDaniel took over the role of Beulah on The Beulah Show, she became the first black to star in a radio program intended for a general audience.
McDaniel had a broad smile, ample proportions, and ebullient manner.
McDaniel was married four times. Little is known of any of her marriages, except that they were all relatively short and unhappy. Her first husband was Howard Hickman whom she married at age 15. He died in 1915. Her second marriage ended abruptly in 1922 when her husband of three months, George Langford, was reportedly killed by gunfire. In 1941 McDaniel was married, for a third time, to James L. Crawford. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1945. Her last marriage, to an interior decorator named Larry Williams, lasted only a few months.
He organized his own family into a minstrel troupe.
She bribed Hattie into silence with spare change as she sang continuously.
She began her entertainment career as a member of minstrel shows with several members of her family.
He got Hattie a spot on a KNX radio program.
