It has been very enlightening for me to study about the black women in the entertainment industry. In the early twentieth century African American men and women were limited to roles featuring them in servant positions such as waiters or maids. Black women did not demand better roles until the 1960’s. Thanks to the courageous efforts of women like Oprah Winfrey, Diahann Carroll, and Gail Fisher the mostly while profession of television and movies began to accept black people. By the 1970’s things continued to improve for black women who desire to be on TV or in the movies.
This week we will feature two famous African American female actors –Hattie McDaniel and Dorothy Dandridge. Both women were victims of racial abuse. You will probably be shocked at their treatment, and we can only be thankful that they persevered in spite of it. They loved acting and we are now the beneficiaries of some of the best movies ever made. They helped to make changes for racial justice.
Hattie McDaniel – Actor and a First Oscar (1893- 1952)
Hattie was born as the thirteenth child to Henry and Susan McDaniel on June 10, 1893. Her father was a civil war veteran and Susan was a domestic worker. In 1901 the McDaniel’s moved to Denver, Colorado. Hattie was one of only two black children at her elementary school. She was popular among her classmates in part due to her singing ability.
Hattie decided to drop out of high school to focus on a career in singing and dancing. She had been starring in shows such as The Mighty Minstrels. She decided to work with her brother’s own troupe by 1909. In 1911 she married Howard Hickman and went on to organize an all-woman’s minstrel show.
For the next few years, Hattie worked in radio and on vaudeville. She wrote much of her own work. When there weren’t enough gigs, she managed to support herself taking jobs wherever she could. In 1929 she worked at Sam Pick’s Suburban Inn in Milwaukee as a vocalist.
Around 1930, Hattie and her brother Sam and her sister Etta moved to Los Angeles. They did radio work and Sam and Etta obtained minor roles in movies. Hattie was very popular on her brother’s show at KNX, earning the nickname “HI Hat Hattie” for putting on formal dress for her first appearance on the program.
Hattie received her first small role as an extra in a Hollywood film in 1931. Then in 1932 she played the role of a housekeeper in The Golden West. As we have already seen in previous posts, roles for black women were hard to come by. Hattie did manage to get some bit parts here and there.
Then in 1934, Hattie got her big break. She starred in a major motion picture by a major director, John Ford, entitled Judge Priest. She sang a duet with Will Rogers. The next year she starred with Lionel Barrymore in one of my favorite Shirley Temple movies, The Little Colonel. Hollywood directors were enthralled with her performance and her she got the role of Queenie in the film, Showboat with Irene Dunne in 1936. (Hattie had already starred in the stage production of Showboat.)
The highlight of Hattie’s career came when she starred as Mammy in the Academy Award Winning Gone With the Wind. In 1940 Hattie became the first black female to win an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. Sad to say, all of the black actors would be barred from attending the Premiere at Loew’s Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939. As we have seen in this series of posts, Hattie was not the only African American in Hollywood to be denied honor for her work.[1] A controversy swirled around Hattie with some praising her and some condemning her for furthering a demeaning image for African Americans.
Hattie was even attacked by the black media for starring in a role that played into the prejudice against African Americans by stereotyping them as servants to white people. Hattie replied that she could choose any roles she wanted. She also pointed out how strong a character Mammy was in the movie. Hattie felt that it was still a step in the right direction. In her role as Mammy she went beyond servitude toward “sly humor”. She acted like the perfect servant but put her employers in their place. It seems that people appreciated the feisty Mammy! But Hattie would go on to work toward more equitable roles for African Americans.
Later Major studio heads, Walter White of the NAACP, and Wendell Willkie struck up an agreement that there would be better roles for black actors in Hollywood, roles portraying them as normal people in everyday life. They would try to end the stereotyping. Organized African American groups began to give their own awards for movies based on the new standards of justice.
Hattie helped with the WWII effort in the 1940’s. She promoted bond sales and entertained the troops. She did not receive any more roles in the movies, so after the war she returned to radio. She starred in CBS radio The Beulah Show from 1947. In 1951 she had just started filming the television version of Beulah, when she suffered from a heart attack. Then she was diagnosed with cancer, ending her entertainment career. She bravely fought the cancer but succumbed on October 26, 1952.
After her death, Hattie was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. The US Post Office has commemorated her with a stamp introduced in 2006. Writer Jill Watts published a biography of her life – Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood – in 2005.
Hattie’s legacy includes her wonderful movies, radio shows, and her stance for justice for African American actors. She was a pivotal point for better treatment of black actors in Hollywood. She is surely among the most remembered actors in Hollywood!
Dorothy Dandridge – Nominated for Oscar, Best Actress (1922-1965)
Dorothy Dandridge was the first African American female actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. This was for her starring role in the 1954 musical production of Carmen Jones. Dorothy won acclaim for her acting and appeared on Life Magazine in recognition of her Academy Award for Best Actress (1954).
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 9, 1922. Her mother Ruby left her husband while she was pregnant with Dorothy, so Dorothy never knew her father. Ruby was an actress and later pushed Dorothy and her sister Vivian into show business as a sister act called the Wonder Children. The girls traveled around singing at churches and other places.
Around 1930 the family moved to Los Angeles. A few years later she started a singing group, The Dandridge Sisters, with her sister and a friend Etta Jones. Dorothy later began appearing in small roles in movies, including the popular Marx Brothers classic A Day at the Races (1937) and Going Places (1938) with Louis Armstrong. She had a dancing role in the 1941 Sonja Henie musical Sun Valley Serenade. What is appalling to us today but was seen as perfectly acceptable in the 1940’s, Dorothy’s tap-dancing routine in the movie with Harold Nicholas was cut from the film version that was played in the South.
Dorothy and Harold were married in 1942. Sadly, she had a daughter who had brain damage. Dorothy sought a cure and, in the meantime, paid for expensive care for her daughter. That was not the only tragic part of her marriage. Harold was a womanizer and Dorothy eventually divorced him in 1951.
A later incident in Dorothy’s life illustrates just how bigoted white people were at the time. I will let author Nii Ntreh explain from his article – “How a Las Vegas hotel drained their pool because Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe into it”:[2] Ntreh’s article is a good summary of the problem of racial injustice in society at that time.
“These days, Hollywood is often credited with being at the forefront of social change and progress, although that assertion can adequately be refuted. The showbiz industry is very much a consequence of what is considered acceptable politics at any given time. However, whatever Hollywood was at Dandridge’s time is comparably worse than what Hollywood is now.
For her first four films, Dandridge was uncredited, partly due to the minor role she played and mostly due to her skin color. It was not until her role in the 1940 film Four Shall Die that Dandridge was credited. She was 18 years old at the time but she was a minor celebrity of a sort, due to shows played by The Dandridge Sisters. It also turned out that although she was uncredited in the films, she had not gone unnoticed by the theater-going public.
It also did turn out that fame was not nearly enough to spare Dandridge the ugliness of her America. As she made it into the 1950s even as a more appreciated actress, Dandridge was reportedly invited to Las Vegas to perform. She had not been the first. Trailblazers including Nat King Cole and Lena Horne were all recipients of such invitations which were considered an honor and a chance for a good payday.
But all the Black entertainers who went to Las Vegas at the time also realized that Sin City was not accepting of certain sins, including giving equal treatment to white and Black people. Las Vegas segregated or simply kept out Black people from many establishments even if said Black people were the headline acts on nights. You could fill a room with thousands of paying patrons at a hotel and still not be allowed to eat at that hotel’s dining area.
When Dandridge stayed at one of those casino hotels where she was billed to perform, she was told the swimming pool was out of bounds for Black guests. Dandridge is said to have been enraged by the hotel’s rules so much so that she actually moved to break them, somewhat.
She showed up at the pool in her bathing suit as the all-white swimming crowd gazed. Then Dandridge just stuck her toe into the water. The hotel’s management then proceeded to drain all of the water from the pool as a result of Dandrige’s rebellious toe-dipping.”
Later, a film about Dorothy Dandridge starring Halle Berry was made entitled, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge(1999). The incident of the pool is dramatized as it really happened when Dorothy was there. You see Halle Berry as Dorothy walk past the pool at night watching black workers scrubbing away her supposed contamination.
Dorothy complained to her friend Harry Belafonte who also suffered from prejudice that if she had been white, she would have obtained many more leading roles. Dorothy appeared in one more major film, Academy Award winning Porgy and Bess (1959) opposite Sidney Poitier. She was offered a role in The King and I (1956) but she refused to play the part of an enslaved person.
Sadly, after this Dorothy’s life took a downturn. She had several affairs; one of them was a highly abusive relationship. She began drinking heavily and taking antidepressants. She tried to resume a career but failed. She could no longer pay for her daughter’s care and put her in an institution. I can’t help but wonder if she hadn’t lived just a few years later, she wouldn’t have received more movie roles and not experienced such poverty and despair. In our story on Hattie McDaniel we saw that in the next decade things would begin to change. But it was too late for Dorothy Dandridge.
Dorothy was found dead in her home on September 8, 1965. It was reported as an embolism, gut later was found to be an overdose of antidepressants. She had a little over $2 in her bank account at the time. How tragic that her life was cut short. She was only 42 years old, and Hollywood was just around the corner from making changes. Dorothy did leave a legacy of some wonderful films. I have watched many of these classic movies many times.
Conclusion
Watching Hollywood movies made then (1930’s and 1940’s) and now we can witness the gradual changes that have been made for black actors. This is very important because the American people take many cues about black people from what they see on the screen. We are thankful many strides toward justice for African Americans have been made and I believe that changes at movie studios helped. The problem with prejudice is in ourselves and how we view others. My prayer is that in all areas of society people will change their unjust, unreasonable prejudicial views. I dream of a day when all people, black and white, male and female, rich and poor, and young and old will live in peace and harmony with each other.
Black American Women in the Movies
Black Women in America – Part 27
It has been very enlightening for me to study about the black women in the entertainment industry. In the early twentieth century African American men and women were limited to roles featuring them in servant positions such as waiters or maids. Black women did not demand better roles until the 1960’s. Thanks to the courageous efforts of women like Oprah Winfrey, Diahann Carroll, and Gail Fisher the mostly while profession of television and movies began to accept black people. By the 1970’s things continued to improve for black women who desire to be on TV or in the movies.
This week we will feature two famous African American female actors –Hattie McDaniel and Dorothy Dandridge. Both women were victims of racial abuse. You will probably be shocked at their treatment, and we can only be thankful that they persevered in spite of it. They loved acting and we are now the beneficiaries of some of the best movies ever made. They helped to make changes for racial justice.
Hattie McDaniel – Actor and a First Oscar (1893- 1952)
Hattie was born as the thirteenth child to Henry and Susan McDaniel on June 10, 1893. Her father was a civil war veteran and Susan was a domestic worker. In 1901 the McDaniel’s moved to Denver, Colorado. Hattie was one of only two black children at her elementary school. She was popular among her classmates in part due to her singing ability.
Hattie decided to drop out of high school to focus on a career in singing and dancing. She had been starring in shows such as The Mighty Minstrels. She decided to work with her brother’s own troupe by 1909. In 1911 she married Howard Hickman and went on to organize an all-woman’s minstrel show.
For the next few years, Hattie worked in radio and on vaudeville. She wrote much of her own work. When there weren’t enough gigs, she managed to support herself taking jobs wherever she could. In 1929 she worked at Sam Pick’s Suburban Inn in Milwaukee as a vocalist.
Around 1930, Hattie and her brother Sam and her sister Etta moved to Los Angeles. They did radio work and Sam and Etta obtained minor roles in movies. Hattie was very popular on her brother’s show at KNX, earning the nickname “HI Hat Hattie” for putting on formal dress for her first appearance on the program.
Hattie received her first small role as an extra in a Hollywood film in 1931. Then in 1932 she played the role of a housekeeper in The Golden West. As we have already seen in previous posts, roles for black women were hard to come by. Hattie did manage to get some bit parts here and there.
Then in 1934, Hattie got her big break. She starred in a major motion picture by a major director, John Ford, entitled Judge Priest. She sang a duet with Will Rogers. The next year she starred with Lionel Barrymore in one of my favorite Shirley Temple movies, The Little Colonel. Hollywood directors were enthralled with her performance and her she got the role of Queenie in the film, Showboat with Irene Dunne in 1936. (Hattie had already starred in the stage production of Showboat.)
The highlight of Hattie’s career came when she starred as Mammy in the Academy Award Winning Gone With the Wind. In 1940 Hattie became the first black female to win an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. Sad to say, all of the black actors would be barred from attending the Premiere at Loew’s Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939. As we have seen in this series of posts, Hattie was not the only African American in Hollywood to be denied honor for her work.[1] A controversy swirled around Hattie with some praising her and some condemning her for furthering a demeaning image for African Americans.
Hattie was even attacked by the black media for starring in a role that played into the prejudice against African Americans by stereotyping them as servants to white people. Hattie replied that she could choose any roles she wanted. She also pointed out how strong a character Mammy was in the movie. Hattie felt that it was still a step in the right direction. In her role as Mammy she went beyond servitude toward “sly humor”. She acted like the perfect servant but put her employers in their place. It seems that people appreciated the feisty Mammy! But Hattie would go on to work toward more equitable roles for African Americans.
Later Major studio heads, Walter White of the NAACP, and Wendell Willkie struck up an agreement that there would be better roles for black actors in Hollywood, roles portraying them as normal people in everyday life. They would try to end the stereotyping. Organized African American groups began to give their own awards for movies based on the new standards of justice.
Hattie helped with the WWII effort in the 1940’s. She promoted bond sales and entertained the troops. She did not receive any more roles in the movies, so after the war she returned to radio. She starred in CBS radio The Beulah Show from 1947. In 1951 she had just started filming the television version of Beulah, when she suffered from a heart attack. Then she was diagnosed with cancer, ending her entertainment career. She bravely fought the cancer but succumbed on October 26, 1952.
After her death, Hattie was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. The US Post Office has commemorated her with a stamp introduced in 2006. Writer Jill Watts published a biography of her life – Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood – in 2005.
Hattie’s legacy includes her wonderful movies, radio shows, and her stance for justice for African American actors. She was a pivotal point for better treatment of black actors in Hollywood. She is surely among the most remembered actors in Hollywood!
Dorothy Dandridge – Nominated for Oscar, Best Actress (1922-1965)
Dorothy Dandridge was the first African American female actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. This was for her starring role in the 1954 musical production of Carmen Jones. Dorothy won acclaim for her acting and appeared on Life Magazine in recognition of her Academy Award for Best Actress (1954).
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 9, 1922. Her mother Ruby left her husband while she was pregnant with Dorothy, so Dorothy never knew her father. Ruby was an actress and later pushed Dorothy and her sister Vivian into show business as a sister act called the Wonder Children. The girls traveled around singing at churches and other places.
Around 1930 the family moved to Los Angeles. A few years later she started a singing group, The Dandridge Sisters, with her sister and a friend Etta Jones. Dorothy later began appearing in small roles in movies, including the popular Marx Brothers classic A Day at the Races (1937) and Going Places (1938) with Louis Armstrong. She had a dancing role in the 1941 Sonja Henie musical Sun Valley Serenade. What is appalling to us today but was seen as perfectly acceptable in the 1940’s, Dorothy’s tap-dancing routine in the movie with Harold Nicholas was cut from the film version that was played in the South.
Dorothy and Harold were married in 1942. Sadly, she had a daughter who had brain damage. Dorothy sought a cure and, in the meantime, paid for expensive care for her daughter. That was not the only tragic part of her marriage. Harold was a womanizer and Dorothy eventually divorced him in 1951.
A later incident in Dorothy’s life illustrates just how bigoted white people were at the time. I will let author Nii Ntreh explain from his article – “How a Las Vegas hotel drained their pool because Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe into it”:[2] Ntreh’s article is a good summary of the problem of racial injustice in society at that time.
“These days, Hollywood is often credited with being at the forefront of social change and progress, although that assertion can adequately be refuted. The showbiz industry is very much a consequence of what is considered acceptable politics at any given time. However, whatever Hollywood was at Dandridge’s time is comparably worse than what Hollywood is now.
For her first four films, Dandridge was uncredited, partly due to the minor role she played and mostly due to her skin color. It was not until her role in the 1940 film Four Shall Die that Dandridge was credited. She was 18 years old at the time but she was a minor celebrity of a sort, due to shows played by The Dandridge Sisters. It also turned out that although she was uncredited in the films, she had not gone unnoticed by the theater-going public.
It also did turn out that fame was not nearly enough to spare Dandridge the ugliness of her America. As she made it into the 1950s even as a more appreciated actress, Dandridge was reportedly invited to Las Vegas to perform. She had not been the first. Trailblazers including Nat King Cole and Lena Horne were all recipients of such invitations which were considered an honor and a chance for a good payday.
But all the Black entertainers who went to Las Vegas at the time also realized that Sin City was not accepting of certain sins, including giving equal treatment to white and Black people. Las Vegas segregated or simply kept out Black people from many establishments even if said Black people were the headline acts on nights. You could fill a room with thousands of paying patrons at a hotel and still not be allowed to eat at that hotel’s dining area.
When Dandridge stayed at one of those casino hotels where she was billed to perform, she was told the swimming pool was out of bounds for Black guests. Dandridge is said to have been enraged by the hotel’s rules so much so that she actually moved to break them, somewhat.
She showed up at the pool in her bathing suit as the all-white swimming crowd gazed. Then Dandridge just stuck her toe into the water. The hotel’s management then proceeded to drain all of the water from the pool as a result of Dandrige’s rebellious toe-dipping.”
Later, a film about Dorothy Dandridge starring Halle Berry was made entitled, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge(1999). The incident of the pool is dramatized as it really happened when Dorothy was there. You see Halle Berry as Dorothy walk past the pool at night watching black workers scrubbing away her supposed contamination.
Dorothy complained to her friend Harry Belafonte who also suffered from prejudice that if she had been white, she would have obtained many more leading roles. Dorothy appeared in one more major film, Academy Award winning Porgy and Bess (1959) opposite Sidney Poitier. She was offered a role in The King and I (1956) but she refused to play the part of an enslaved person.
Sadly, after this Dorothy’s life took a downturn. She had several affairs; one of them was a highly abusive relationship. She began drinking heavily and taking antidepressants. She tried to resume a career but failed. She could no longer pay for her daughter’s care and put her in an institution. I can’t help but wonder if she hadn’t lived just a few years later, she wouldn’t have received more movie roles and not experienced such poverty and despair. In our story on Hattie McDaniel we saw that in the next decade things would begin to change. But it was too late for Dorothy Dandridge.
Dorothy was found dead in her home on September 8, 1965. It was reported as an embolism, gut later was found to be an overdose of antidepressants. She had a little over $2 in her bank account at the time. How tragic that her life was cut short. She was only 42 years old, and Hollywood was just around the corner from making changes. Dorothy did leave a legacy of some wonderful films. I have watched many of these classic movies many times.
Conclusion
Watching Hollywood movies made then (1930’s and 1940’s) and now we can witness the gradual changes that have been made for black actors. This is very important because the American people take many cues about black people from what they see on the screen. We are thankful many strides toward justice for African Americans have been made and I believe that changes at movie studios helped. The problem with prejudice is in ourselves and how we view others. My prayer is that in all areas of society people will change their unjust, unreasonable prejudicial views. I dream of a day when all people, black and white, male and female, rich and poor, and young and old will live in peace and harmony with each other.
[1] See for example “Black Women Artists” https://mylordkatie.wordpress.com/2022/05/09/black-women-in-america-part-9/ And see story below on Dorothy Dandridge.
[2] I couldn’t find a better example of how things were in Hollywood in the early days of film making. Nor could I tell the story as well as Nii Ntreh. “How a Las Vegas hotel drained their pool because Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe into it” March 08, 2021. https://face2faceafrica.com/article/how-a-las-vegas-hotel-drained-their-pool-because-dorothy-dandridge-dipped-her-toe-into-it
Blog Categories
“… you can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things.”
Blog Categories