Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind.
On February 29, 1940, at the 12th Academy Awards ceremony held at the Ambassador Hotel's Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), making her the first African American to win an Academy Award in any category.
This historic achievement occurred during an era of deep racial segregation in the United States. In a bitter irony reflecting the racism of the time, McDaniel was not permitted to attend the film's premiere in segregated Atlanta, and at the awards ceremony itself she was seated at a separate table at the back of the room, away from her white co-stars, due to the hotel's whites-only policy — a policy relaxed only after producer David O. Selznick intervened.
In her acceptance speech, McDaniel expressed hope that she would always be a credit to her race and to the motion picture industry. Her win opened a door — however narrow and fraught — for Black performers in Hollywood, even as the industry continued to relegate Black actors to stereotyped and limited roles for decades afterward.
McDaniel's Oscar would not be matched by another Black woman until Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress in 1991, underscoring just how significant and, for decades, isolated McDaniel's achievement remained. Her win is widely regarded as one of the most important moments in the history of the Academy Awards and in the broader struggle for Black representation in American cinema.