Erin Perez is guest blogger on this final day of February, 2021. Her passionate interest prompts the telling of the achievements of a great lady, and the following story needs to be told today! It is the last day of Black History Month which is celebrated each February. Oscar awards movie history was made when Hattie McDaniel clinched the win in the Best Supporting Actress category on February 29, 1940 (a Leap Year).
Erin also celebrates her birthday in February. She previously researched and wrote a guest post concerning pioneer filmmaker Thomas Ince and his legacy in Culver City.
Hattie McDaniel's Legacy in Los Angeles
At the very end of South Harbor Harvard Blvd in the West Adams
district, right before the 10 freeway, stands a green and white two-story
manor. A wrought iron gate, purposely overgrown with pink and red
bougainvillea, obscures and closes off the estate from passersby. Currently
owned by Families for Families, a social services organization based in Los
Angeles, the house once belonged to Academy Award winning actress, Hattie
McDaniel.
Hattie was
the youngest of 13 children born to two formerly enslaved parents in 1893. Her
father had fought and served with the United States Colored Troops during the
Civil War. Hattie grew up in a religious household, with her father becoming a
preacher and her mother singing gospel music after the war. Like her mother,
Hattie fell in love with music and began her career juggling vaudeville gigs
and a domestic service job to pay the bills.
By the 1930s, Hattie had landed in Hollywood, she was now
juggling cleaning houses both on and off screen. A prominent role as a singing
maid in Judge Priest (1934) allowed Hattie to make money as a free-lance player
in the mid 1930s. This recognition and financial stability for Hattie was
short-lived as the studio system transitioned to long-term contracts and
exclusivity with its signed players. Black free-lance players like Hattie,
already facing racist discrimination in a Eurocentric industry, were shut out even
more.
Hattie began
offering maid services again.
Meanwhile, Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, the bestselling book of 1936, had its film
rights purchased by David O. Selznick. Though she was struggling for parts,
Hattie was well-known and well-regarded in Hollywood circles. She was asked to
audition for the part of Mammy, Scarlett O’ Hara’s fussy and astute slave.
Hattie got the part, leading her to win Best Supporting Actress for the
role in 1940, beating out her costar, Olivia De Havilland. She would be the
first Black American to receive an Oscar. Shortly after, Hattie purchased the
house at 2203 South Harbor Harvard Boulevard, where she would go on to throw star-studded
soirees and USO dances during WW2.
 |
| Photo courtesy of Erin Perez |
The career triumphs, glass ceiling-shattering moments and personal gains were part of a double-edged sword for Hattie. For every step she took forward for herself, Hattie still faced racial discrimination and indignities, and even pushback from other Black Americans. She was not allowed at the Gone With The Wind premiere in Atlanta, as the theater was segregated. On the night of her Oscar win, Hattie and her escort were made to sit at a table next to a wall, far away from her white co-stars, as the Coconut Grove Restaurant did not allow Black guests.
When Disney’s Song of the South came out in 1946, in which
Hattie played a Mammy role similar to the one in Gone With The Wind, Walter
White of the NAACP lambasted her for continuing to play enslaved women and servants,
as these portrayals reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black people. It was a
warranted call-out, yet Hattie also rightly pointed out that Hollywood wasn’t providing
her with the opportunities for any other kinds of roles either. For her,
playing characters in domestic service was the only way she could make an
honest living, without having to resort to going back into domestic service
itself.
One battle in particular that Hattie faced against racial
inequity would set legal precedence in Los Angeles and have wide-ranging
impacts on the makeup of the city as well.
The West Adams district had attracted Hollywood stars before,
Theda Bara and Fatty Arbuckle, with its array of extravagant manors and houses.
The neighborhood is one of the oldest – as Los Angeles transitioned to a major
city at the turn of the century, West Adams had boomed around the Adams
Boulevard Corridor, as wealthy Los Angelinos bought lots and built grand homes
in various popular architectural designs: Victorian; Queen Anne; Craftsman;
Mediterranean etc. It had also been a largely white neighborhood, until the 30s
and 40s, when Black entertainers and Black professionals began buying from
white owners, themselves moving west, to a bourgeoning Beverly Hills. Hattie
McDaniel, already in nearby Jefferson Park, bought the green-and-white manor;
singer and actress Ethel Waters moved across the street; actress Louise
Beavers, another Black actress, lived nearby as well; the tap-dancing duo of
the Nicholas Brothers also had a house in the neighborhood. In fact, the rising
prominence of Black homeowners led to the area being rechristened as “Sugar
Hill,” a nod to a neighborhood in the also predominantly Black Harlem in New
York City.
 |
| Source: Now & Then in Historic West Adams, West Adams Heritage Association, 1987 |
 |
| Source: Now & Then in Historic West Adams |
However, several white homeowners objected to their new neighbors. Calling back on prior restrictive covenants that did not allow homeowners to sell to Black families, 8 of these homeowners banded together and sued their Black neighbors to be evicted by Los Angeles. Hattie McDaniel, Waters, Beavers and around 40 other Black homeowners of the Sugar Hill area organized a front and appeared together before the Los Angeles Superior Court on December 5th, 1945, to defend their right to home ownership.
Hattie not only faced discrimination from Hollywood, she
also had to fight to be afforded equal protection under the law and keep what she
worked so hard to get. The judge presiding over the case sided with Hattie and
the other defendants, declaring “That it is time that members of the Negro race
are accorded, without reservations and evasions, the full rights guaranteed
them under the 14th Amendment of the Federal Constitution. Judges have been
avoiding the real issue far too long. Certainly there was no discrimination
against the Negro race when it came to calling upon its members to die on the
battlefields in defense of this country in the war just ended.”
The eight white homeowners pushed for an appeal, yet were
thwarted in 1948, when the Supreme Court, presiding over a similar case, ruled
that restrictive covenants could not be enforced, as doing so would be
prohibited by the 14th Amendment.
The Sugar Hill case was a landmark in Los Angeles history,
opening up its traditionally white neighborhoods to non-white owners who
otherwise could have been evicted due to the covenants or not sold property at
all.
For Hattie however, this victory would be short-lived. Her
time as an owner and famed hostess in West Adams would soon come to an end. On
October 6th, 1952, just 7 years after the landmark case, she would die of
breast cancer, not in her own home in Sugar Hill, but in the hospital of the
Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills. She was only 59. Her trailblazing
legacy, though she faced setbacks and criticism, still resounds. When Mo-Nique
won Best Supporting Actress in 2010 for Precious, she wore white gardenias in
her hair, just as Hattie did in 1940 as an homage to her. Sugar Hill and West
Adams remains a largely Black and Latinx area. But like Hattie, these
neighborhoods still face the injustices of systemic racism - in the more insidious
form of gentrification. Her legacy of changing L.A.’s map remains a battle.
Special thanks to Betty for inviting me once more and to Ashley Guerrero for looking over this piece and helping me edit.
Sources:
Ryan, D. (1940, Feb 11). Article 23 -- no title: YOOHOO! HI'YA, HATTIE! Los Angeles Times (1923-1995)
Hedda hopper's HOLLYWOOD. (1940, Feb 16). Los Angeles Times (1923-1995)
Negro property owners protest. (1945, Dec 6). Los Angeles Times (1923-1995)
Race zoning case in supreme court. (1946, Oct 03). Los Angeles Times (1923-1995)
Meares, Hadley. (2018, Feb 18). The thrill of Sugar Hill. Curbed Los Angeles. https://la.curbed.com/2018/2/22/16979700/west-adams-history-segregation-housing-covenants
