Hattie McDaniel: Much More than Mammy
written by Jacob Nadir
Eight years after Hattie McDaniel became the first Black recipient of an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind, she led a legal battle to end the use of racist housing covenants in the Sugar Hill, West Adams area in Los Angeles. This set the tone for the eventual invoking of the 14th Amendment to declare restricting housing covenants as unconstitutional.
On a good day with no traffic, Hollywood and West Adams are a short drive away. Yet, they’re worlds apart. McDaniel had a foot in each world, dragging them each forward into a new phase. Hollywood entering its infancy phase with the practice of inclusion. West Adams entering a phase of almost constant resistance.
Hattie McDaniel was reduced to the help in all of her first roles. Starting with The Golden West (1931), then Judge Priest (1934), Alice Adams (1935), The Mad Miss Manton (1938), and then culminating in her award-winning performance in Gone With the Wind (1939). Still with each film, her character gradually became more present and assertive. McDaniel, along with Katherine Hepburn call out her employer’s pretentious endeavors in Alice Adams. McDaniel tells off Barbara Stanwyck in The Mad Miss Manton.
She also makes appearances in several films. She has a scene with Shirley Temple, sings with Will Rogers and Clark Gable, and has (perhaps) her best role as Queenie in the Oscar Hammerstein - Jerome Kern musical film rendition of Edna Ferber’s Showboat (1936). Despite all of these roles, and the Mammy-character that dictated much of her public image, McDaniel makes plain, “I’m a fine Black Mammy [on screen], but I’m Hattie McDaniel in my house.”
Hattie McDaniel poses with her new car
copyright Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences
And “my house” was quite the house. Lena Horne remembers McDaniel’s home as “the most exquisite house I had ever seen in my life, the best everything.” Light colors on the walls. French, ivory furniture. Big, lush backyard. Several porches. Air raid shelter in the basement. This was a famous house, covered in the press, where Black and white celebrities congregated. Eight white residents in Sugar Hill had enough in 1945 and sued to have the Black residents of Sugar Hill evicted due to the restrictive covenants technically still in place. The white residents claimed “that if restrictive covenants were not enforced, their property would lose value and racial clashes would inevitably ensue.”
Close to sixty Black families lived in the neighborhood by this point. Since the mid 30’s, many affluent Black families moved into the Craftsman and Victorian homes in the West Adams area left behind by white families who had moved farther west. Sensing the urgency of the moment, local Francis Williams and McDaniel began holding meetings and organizing. NAACP lawyer Loren Miller soon came on board.
On December 5, 1945 Hattie McDaniel led the Sugar Hill residents along with over two-hundred supporters into Los Angeles Superior Court. Here, the white Sugar Hill residents’ attorney argued that restrictive covenants were protected by the constitution. Loren Miller countered and proclaimed that it was the opposite - that the 14th Amendment is denied under restrictive covenants. California Supreme Court Judge Thurmond Clarke agreed with Miller making it the first ruling where the 14th Amendment was used to end the enforcement of covenant race restrictions.
Immediately after the ruling, Sugar Hill entered a glory phase. The 14th Amendment was used again by Loren Miller and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1948 in a similar case in Missouri to disallow the enforcement of restrictive covenants. Progress was felt, although it wouldn’t be until 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was included in the Civil Rights Bill.
Lena Horne (far left) newly arrived to Los Angeles in company with Black Hollywood elite including McDaniel (to Horne’s right), McDaniel’s husband James Crawford, Geri Nicolas, Faryard Nicolas, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson with his wife Mamie, (bottom row) agent Ben Carter, and Nick Stewart
photo by Rigmor Newman Nicholas
By then, the Black population in Los Angeles had become relatively less centralized, with families moving to areas such as Lafayette Square and Baldwin Hills. McDaniel moved more towards Mid City in 1951, but died just a year later. Her wish to be buried at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery was denied. A memorial for her was erected at Hollywood Forever in 1999, but her grave is at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery on Washington and Normandie.
Then suddenly, a high volume of massive public projects began taking place in Los Angeles. Rumors about the freeways began circulating in 1953. The city systematically and brutally removed the residents of Chavez Ravine mostly starting in 1950, eventually clearing out the neighborhood entirely for the construction of Dodger Stadium in 1959. By 1963 the Santa Monica Freeway cut through Sugar Hill, just as the other freeways running through LA County did to many Black and Brown neighborhoods.
The aftermath of all this is best depicted in the gentrification lecture scene in Boyz N The Hood: Laurence Fishburne breaks down the past several decades of systematic displacement flawlessly in front of three generations of LA natives. Hattie McDaniel’s grave rests less than five miles away from where this scene was shot. Though not her desired resting site, it is a resting site closer to the Los Angeles that she loved and fought for.
EDITORS NOTE: the above photos were sourced from Donald Bogle’s 2006 book BRIGHT BOULEVARDS, BOLD DREAMS. We do not own the rights to any of the photos used and are using them for illuminative and educational purposes only.