Henry McDaniel was born a slave. His daughter, Hattie, died the first black American to ever win an Oscar, beating her Gone with the Wind co-star Olivia de Havilland for the Best Supporting Actress award. McDaniel, who couldn’t even sit with her white co-stars at the awards, proclaimed that she hoped she’d prove a “credit” to her race, adorned in a blue gown with gardenias in her hair as her eyes brimmed with tears.
It’s a success story, but one as messy and monumental as the nation’s struggle to overcome centuries of racism itself.
With HBO’s decision to pull the southern Civil War epic from its new streaming service, HBO Max, and later admission that it would reshare it on the platform only with an addendum to explain its historical context, the feted film once more became a lightning rod of controversy. Only unlike past reckonings over relics of racism like the fracas over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird, the liberal consensus overwhelmingly backed the book burners. The move wasn’t just embraced by prominent progressives but openly instigated by demands from John Ridley, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave.
And it’s a shame, not just to see our cultural elite embrace illiberalism but also to see it misfire at a film that isn’t just a window into a monstrous worldview but itself a living relic of what we had to overcome to get to our current state of progress. Plenty of those blasting HBO for deplatforming the film pointed out that McDaniel’s role in the film constituted a landmark achievement for racial progress, but the story is much more complicated, heartwrenching, and ultimately American than that.
By the time McDaniel earned the highly coveted role of Mammy, she had long been typecast in the industry as a maid, personally beloved by many in lily-white Hollywood as well with black audiences across the country. But the love for her wasn’t universal. Some black critics had long balked at McDaniel’s willing to take on subservient roles in films highly sympathetic to the South, and the role of Mammy, a fairly one-dimensional character as originally written in the Margaret Mitchell novel, seemed like it would be no different.
Of course, as anyone who has seen the film knows, McDaniel infused stunning depth into the role with a heartbreaking performance. Her performance alone marked a monumental achievement for racial progress. But what went on behind the scenes is just as important.
For starters, a public pressure campaign spearheaded by prominent black newspapers succeeded in convincing filmmakers to strip the screenplay of every single mention of the N-word. The NAACP likewise won its bid to keep out scenes sympathetic to mentions of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. The final product obviously fails to explicate the horrors of slavery, and its presentation of slavery is as much evidence of persistent racism during the time it was filmed as it was of racism during the antebellum South. But black leaders still won small battles that would pave the way for the future of the film industry.
Furthermore, McDaniel’s role in Hollywood shattered crucial glass ceilings. Clark Gable, the film’s leading man and already a close personal friend of McDaniel’s prior to the film, threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere, which forbade black attendees due to its lack of segregated seating as required by law. McDaniel encouraged him to attend anyway, but the fracas likely led her attendance and prominent role in the film’s marketing at the Hollywood premiere, a sharp change from the initial marketing in Atlanta.
This is no straightforward success story, if we can even call it that. And quite frankly, there are stronger narrative arguments against deplatforming the film. After all, it’s the least loyal character to the Confederacy and the one who encourages Scarlett O’Hara’s rebellion, Rhett Butler, who claims the mantle of heroism, not any of the other blind foot soldiers for the South. But it would be a travesty to erase this labor, of some white hate and some black love and struggle, from our collective consciousness.
Sixty years after McDaniel won her Oscar, Mo’Nique became the fourth ever black woman to win Best Supporting Actress. She took to the stage wearing a blue dress and white gardenias in her hair.
“I want to thank Ms. Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she did so I don’t have to,” Mo’Nique said. She did struggle, and the making and final product of Gone with the Wind are both living testaments to the pain and progress of overcoming racism. But it wasn’t in vain, and it’s a legacy worth keeping.
