A replacement for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar awarded to actress Hattie McDaniel for her role in “Gone With The Wind,” missing for decades, will be donated to Howard University and unveiled Sunday.
The original prize, which McDaniel won at the segregated 12th Academy Awards in 1940, was a plaque rather than the statuette that has become synonymous with the Oscars. McDaniel was both the first Black person to be nominated for an Oscar and the first to win.
McDaniel bequeathed the original to Howard University upon her death in 1952, and it was displayed at the school’s College of Fine Arts until it went missing in the late 1960s.
“Hattie McDaniel was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her. We are thrilled to present a replacement of Hattie McDaniel’s Academy Award to Howard University,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in a joint statement this week with Jacqueline Stewart, director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
The original award inspired previous alumni of the university’s drama program, and the school hopes the new award will provide the same spark.
“Ms. Hattie is coming home!” said Phylicia Rashad, best known as the co-star of the 1980s smash “The Cosby Show.”
“When I was a student in the College of Fine Arts at Howard University, in what was then called the Department of Drama, I would often sit and gaze in wonder at the Academy Award that had been presented to Ms. Hattie McDaniel … This immense piece of history will be back in the College of Fine Arts for our students to draw inspiration from,” said the actress, who now is dean of Howard’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.
The historically-Black university will host on Sunday a ceremony commemorating the reception of the replacement.
McDaniel won the Oscar for playing the role of “Mammy” in a film widely criticized today as a Confederate apologia. The ceremony was held at an all-white hotel, which only let McDaniel in as a favor and then at a table where her agent was the only White person seated.
