First African American Oscar Winner - Hattie McDaniel

Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1895 – October 26, 1952) was an American actress and the first black performer to win an Academy Award. She won the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939).

McDaniel was also a professional singer-songwriter, comedienne, stage actress, radio performer, and television star. Hattie McDaniel was in fact the first black woman to sing on the radio in America.^[1][2] Over the course of her career, McDaniel appeared in over 300 films, although she only received screen credits for about 80. She gained the respect of the African American show business community with her generosity, elegance, and charm.

McDaniel has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood: one for her contributions to radio at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard, and one for motion pictures at 1719 Vine Street. In 1975, she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and in 2006 became the first black Oscar winner honored with a US postage stamp. 
^[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattie_McDaniel
 

I found a pretty good site for facts.

http://www.ls.cc.al.us/blackhistory/blackhistory.html

Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies! 

You reminded me, Blessed,  of Butterfly McQueen, who said that in "Gone With The Wind"



"Butterfly" McQueen

1911-1995

 

Actress

Known to generations of movie viewers as Prissy, the frantic, squeaky-voiced servant who is harshly upbraided by Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 Civil War epic Gone With the Wind, actress Butterfly McQueen was first a successful Broadway dancer; she then went on to win critical acclaim for her quirky portrayal of seemingly scatterbrained maids in a handful of popular films in the 1940s. Offscreen, however, she rebelled against Hollywood's rigid system of racial stereotyping and often insisted on altering scenes and dialogue that demeaned people of color. McQueen's announcement in 1947 that she would no longer accept so-called "handkerchief head" parts nearly cost the actress her career. Except for the part of a secretary in the all-black film Killer Diller in 1948, she had no movie offers for the next 20 years. "I didn't mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business," she explained in an interview with People. "But after I did the same thing over and over I resented it. I didn't mind being funny but I didn't like being stupid." While not acting, she worked as a sales clerk, a waitress, a dishwasher, and as a companion to elderly women in order to make ends meet.

McQueen's objection to stereotyped roles was only one of the things that hindered her career, however. She possessed a unique, ethereal quality that made her difficult to cast. "Her comedic gifts were too special and delicate, too unique a blending of the comic and the pathetic, to be effective" in the limited roles available to African Americans throughout the first half of the twentieth century, commented Donald Bogle in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. "With her large, expressive eyes, her bewildered and perplexed stare, and her quivering tremor of a voice, she seemed almost otherworldly." In the late 1960s McQueen returned to the New York stage, where she had launched her theatrical career more than 30 years before. Soon afterwards a variety of small film and television roles came her way, but none earned her the fame of her early work in Gone With the Wind.

Stage, screen, and radio actress Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1911. Her father was a stevedore and her mother worked as a domestic. When McQueen was five years old, her father deserted the family. In order to support herself and her daughter, Mrs. McQueen sought full-time employment in a number of cities up and down the East Coast, sending Thelma to live with an aunt in Augusta, Georgia, until she had settled on a job as a cook in Harlem. Young Thelma completed her high school education in Babylon, Long Island, after yet another move and went on to study nursing at the Lincoln Training School in the Bronx. In 1934, however, she joined Venezuela Jones's Harlem-based Youth Theatre Group, and her career took a different turn. She began to study dance, music, and drama on a professional level, and in 1935 made her stage debut as part of the Butterfly Ballet in Jones's Off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Upon seeing her dance, a friend nicknamed her "Butterfly." She immediately adopted the name as her own, and it remained with her throughout her career.

Two years later McQueen made her Broadway debut as the maid, Lucille, in George Abbott's all-black production, Brown Sugar. Although she played only a minor part and the show closed after only four performances, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times remarked upon "the extraordinary artistry of a high-stepping, little dusky creature who describes herself as Butterfly McQueen." Following her success in Brown Sugar, McQueen was cast in two more George Abbott productions, Brother Rat (1937) and What a Life (1938). She was still working for Abbott when she auditioned for the part of Prissy in Gone With the Wind.

The Origin of Black History Month

Carter G. Woodson was a coal miner and child of former slaves with enthusiasm for the historical documentation of the African-American experience. He decided as a young man that our stories needed to be recognized. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University in history, Carter became a Howard University professor. He then co-founded and financed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, with the lofty goal of having it both publish and fund research and writing projects about black history. After resigning as a professor, Woodson dedicated all of his time to the association, as well as to publishing books and resources about the black experience. One notable quarterly he edited was The Journal of Negro History, which was distributed worldwide.

In 1926, Woodson established Negro History Week, as it was called by the black fraternity Omega Psi Phi, to celebrate the achievements of Afrian-Americans. Woodson chose the second week of February because it marked the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Through Woodson's promotion of the celebration in The Journal of Negro History, and by creating and distributing educational kits for children, Negro History Week gained in popularity. In 1976, it evolved into Black History Month.
 

Learn more about the past and current activities of Woodson's organization, now called the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.
 

Source: Henry Louis Gates & Cornel West, 'The African American Century' (Touchstone 2002)

Did you know there was a black version of the exorcist, yep it was called Abby.  But it never got the press or fame of its white counterpart:    I know it's not a person but it's 70's black film history.

Abby: The Story of a Woman Possessed

Director William Girdler's blaxploitation horror thriller follows a mild-mannered, marriage counselor named Abby Williams (Carol Speed) who becomes possessed by an evil spirit that's followed her father-in-law (William Marshall) home from Nigeria. As Abby begins to seduce strangers and kill them, her preacher husband (Terry Carter) discovers that his wife is now host to a dangerous demon with a ravenous sexual appetite.

Abby came out when I was in middle school.  I love old school sci fi and horror movies.  

Have you ever seen "The Thing with Two Heads"?  Roosevelt Grier  played a convict and for some reason he'd had the head of a racist-mad-scientist-white man grafted onto his body.   They spent most of the movie trying to punch each other out.

LOL,  What the hell.   The thing with two heads. 

Thanks for interesting info, she was young.


Lia D

Hello Ms. Nikki
I hope all is well and Blessed.

It is interesting about many of the old movie and TV actors, there were some brilliant entertainers and business-people among them. I understand that the man that played Step-It-Fetch-It was quite a business man and movie producer. During the 40's and 50's I did not know that there were sooo many high quality Black Films that were produced. I look at Turner Classic Movies during Black History Month and some of those old Black movies are OUTSTANDING! As I reflect, they had to be because there was a ready made audience (segration in the South and Blacks wanting to see themselves in film in the North). Black movies started to turn "sour" with the Blackxploitation films in the 60's-late 80's. For the most part we are finally getting back on track with quality Black Films. I'm sure predecessors like Paul Robeson, Hatti McDaniels, Bo-Jangles, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belefonte and Sidney Poitier...would love to see. I hope the present day actors appreciate for whom backs they stand. (Comic figures to some may there in lay greatness!)

PAUL ROBESON, a brief biography

Paul Robeson was a famous African-American athlete, singer, actor, and advocate for the civil rights of people around the world. He rose to prominence in a time when segregation was legal in the United States, and Black people were being lynched by racist mobs, especially in the South.

Born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, and his mother came from an abolitionist Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and the determination to rise above it. His own life was no less challenging.

In 1915, Paul Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won 15 varsity letters in sports (baseball, basketball, track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He received the Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year, belonged to the Cap & Skull Honor Society, and graduated as Valedictorian. However, it wasn't until 1995, 19 years after his death, that Paul Robeson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

At Columbia Law School (1919-1923), Robeson met and married Eslanda Cordoza Goode, who was to become the first Black woman to head a pathology laboratory. He took a job with a law firm, but left when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He left the practice of law to use his artistic talents in theater and music to promote African and African-American history and culture.

In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in Othello, for which he won the Donaldson Award for Best Acting Performance (1944), and performed in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings. He is known for changing the lines of the Showboat song "Old Man River" from the meek "...I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'....," to a declaration of resistance, "... I must keep fightin' until I'm dying....". His 11 films included Body and Soul (1924), Jericho (1937), and Proud Valley (1939). Robeson's travels taught him that racism was not as virulent in Europe as in the U.S. At home, it was difficult to find restaurants that would serve him, theaters in New York would only seat Blacks in the upper balconies, and his performances were often surrounded with threats or outright harassment. In London, on the other hand, Robeson's opening night performance of Emperor Jones brought the audience to its feet with cheers for twelve encores.

Paul Robeson used his deep baritone voice to promote Black spirituals, to share the cultures of other countries, and to benefit the labor and social movements of his time. He sang for peace and justice in 25 languages throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. Robeson became known as a citizen of the world, equally comfortable with the people of Moscow, Nairobi, and Harlem. Among his friends were future African leader Jomo Kenyatta, India's Nehru, historian Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, anarchist Emma Goldman, and writers James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1933, Robeson donated the proceeds of All God's Chillun to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. At a 1937 rally for the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, he declared, "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative." In New York in 1939, he premiered in Earl Robinson's Ballad for Americans, a cantata celebrating the multi-ethnic, multi-racial face of America. It was greeted with the largest audience response since Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds."

During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and to speak out against racism, in support of labor, and for peace. He was a champion of working people and organized labor. He spoke and performed at strike rallies, conferences, and labor festivals worldwide. As a passionate believer in international cooperation, Robeson protested the growing Cold War and worked tirelessly for friendship and respect between the U.S. and the USSR. In 1945, he headed an organization that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law. In the late 1940s, when dissent was scarcely tolerated in the U.S., Robeson openly questioned why African Americans should fight in the army of a government that tolerated racism. Because of his outspokenness, he was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of being a Communist. Robeson saw this as an attack on the democratic rights of everyone who worked for international friendship and for equality. The accusation nearly ended his career. Eighty of his concerts were canceled, and in 1949 two interracial outdoor concerts in Peekskill, N.Y. were attacked by racist mobs while state police stood by. Robeson responded, "I'm going to sing wherever the people want me to sing...and I won't be frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else."

In 1950, the U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, leading to an eight-year battle to resecure it and to travel again. During those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein to discuss the prospects for world peace, published his autobiography, Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall. Two major labor-related events took place during this time. In 1952 and 1953, he held two concerts at Peace Arch Park on the U.S.-Canadian border, singing to 30-40,000 people in both countries. In 1957, he made a transatlantic radiophone broadcast from New York to coal miners in Wales. In 1960, Robeson made his last concert tour to New Zealand and Australia. In ill health, Paul Robeson retired from public life in 1963. He died on January 23, 1976, at age 77, in Philadelphia.