February 29, 1940: The 1st Black Oscar Winner

At the time, the winners of Best Supporting Actor

and Best Supporting Actress -- regardless of race --

got a smaller trophy, on a plaque.

Note: I would have written an entry for this event, regardless of the date on it. But I wanted to have an entry that happened on a February 29, and this was the best of the rather small bunch.

February 29, 1940: The 12th Academy Awards are held, at the Coconut Grove ballroom of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. For the 1st time, the host is actor Bob Hope. He will go on to host "the Oscars" 19 times. Through 2022, this remains a record.

Surprising no one, Gone with the Wind, having been nominated for 13 Oscars, wins 8 of them, including Best Picture for producer David O. Selznick, Best Director for Victor Fleming, Best Actress for Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, and Best Screenplay, divided between Margaret Mitchell for the original 1936 novel, and Sidney Howard for his film adaptation. It was the 1st posthumous Oscar: Howard had been killed in an accident on his farm the previous August, so he never even saw the finished film.

The biggest shock of the evening was that Clark Gable, who played Rhett Butler, did not win Best Actor. That award went to Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Donat had also beaten out Laurence Olivier for Wuthering Heights, James Stewart for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Mickey Rooney for Babes in Arms. At 19, Rooney was the 1st teenager ever to be nominated for an Oscar.

(Rooney had received a special award the year before, for his "juvenile" roles, and would receive an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement in 1983. But despite Olivier, himself often called the best actor of all time, calling him "the best there has ever been," he never won a regular award, going 0-for-4 as a nominee. Olivier would win 4, but only 1 for acting, in Hamlet in 1948. Gable had already gotten the 1 he would ever win, for It Happened One Night in 1934. Stewart won the next year, for The Philadelphia Story.)

Also among GWTW's awards is Best Supporting Actress, to Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, Scarlett's black maid. McDaniel thus became the 1st African-American actor, of either gender, to win an Academy Award.

She didn't think she would even get the role, as she had become famous as a comedic actress, but Gable -- like his character in the film, he could alternate between generous and rotten in real life -- personally requested her for the role.

As with the book, the film, made just 64 years after the Civil War ended, was pro-South, took the advancing Union Army of "the Yankees" as the villains, and did not criticize slavery.

McDaniel, 46, a native of Colorado and the daughter of slaves, brushed aside the arguments of her own people that her character was a demeaning stereotype, telling the white press, "I loved Mammy. I think I understood her, because my own grandmother worked on a plantation not unlike Tara." 

When the film premiered at the Loew's Grand Theater in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, due to segregation laws, she was not permitted to attend. Gable threatened to boycott the premiere, but McDaniel herself told him not to, as it would hurt his career, and not help hers at all.

She was permitted to attend the film's Hollywood debut, 13 days later. But for the Oscar ceremony, the Ambassador Hotel had a strict whites-only policy, allowing McDaniel in as a favor. For what would later be called the "afterparty," her white co-stars went to a whites-only club, and she was denied entry.

McDaniel became the 1st black actor to star in her own radio show, Beulah, on CBS, in 1947. Jazz singer Ethel Waters became the 1st to do so on television, also in Beulah, on ABC, in 1950. She quit after a year, because the production was being moved from New York to Hollywood, and she didn't want to leave the New York clubs that were paying her better.

McDaniel was given the role, and one of her co-stars was Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen, who had played Prissy in Gone with the Wind. But McDaniel developed cancer, and only lasted a year as Beulah herself, and died in 1952. Louise Beavers took over the role, and held it until the show was canceled in 1953.

No other black person would be nominated for an Oscar until 1954, when Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for Best Actress for Carmen Jones. The betting favorites were Dandridge and Judy Garland, for A Star Is Born. Supporters of both were outraged when the award went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. It was hardly her best role, much less a better performance than either Dandridge's or Garland's. Rumors that she slept her way to that award persist to this day. Dandridge died in 1965.

In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the 1st male actor to win an Oscar, taking Best Actor, for Lilies of the Field. In 1975, Sammy Davis Jr., who never won an Oscar, became the 1st black person to host the ceremony. In 1991, Whoopi Goldberg became the next black woman to win an Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, for Ghost. In 1994, she became the 1st black woman to host the ceremony.

In 2002, both lead Oscars went to black actors: Denzel Washington for Training Day, and Halle Berry -- who had previously starred as her fellow Cleveland native in the made-for-cable-TV movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge -- for Monster's Ball.

*

February 29, 1940 was a Thursday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. But there were 3 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers lost to the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the old Madison Square Garden.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 4-2 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* At the time, there were 7 teams in the NHL. The New York Americans were not scheduled.