The Legacy of Hattie McDaniel in Los Angeles, Cal.

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