Hattie Mcdaniel

892 Words2 Pages

Hattie McDaniel was one of thirteen children born to Henry and Susan McDaniel. Her father was a former slave who joined the military after liberation. Then he became a minister and took his family down to Tennessee. Hattie was a talented child who could sing and act. She dropped out of high school her sophomore year to pursue acting. Like most actors, she took a side job as a cook, a clerk and a washwoman to make money until her career took off. She moved to LA with one of her brothers and sisters and really started to pursue acting. Soon she landed roles as a servant in multiple movies in Hollywood. It was until 1940 that she was recognized for one of these roles. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone With The Wind. …show more content…

I know what it feels like to be too white for the black crowd and too black for the white crowd. I have people constantly telling me I am an Oreo because I speak properly and don’t like rap music and I am not the stereotype people want me to be. Obviously, Hattie faced it on a bigger scale, being an actress and facing racism and criticism from all sides. I think it’s truly admirable that even in that she stuck to what she was happy doing. At the end of the day, it isn’t about if you made other people happy, it’s about if you are happy. That is one thing I will take away from reading about Hattie and writing about her. She never let anyone tell her she wasn’t good enough. She stuck for herself too. When the director wanted her to say the N-word in Gone With The Wind, she straight up said no and she is the reason you never hear the N-word in that movie. She is amazing and it sucks that the black community back then didn’t see her full potential. They just wanted to look at the negatives. The NAACP disowned because she played a servant but she repeatedly said she wasn’t happy to play a servant. That was all she could play. Her playing a servant had nothing to with who she really was and people don’t really see the difference between what she played and who she was. She was a person and to quote Ms. Hattie McDaniel herself, “I am an actress, when you say ‘cut’ I am no longer

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