So what happened to the Oscar? For now, Professor Carter thinks that the best evidence suggests that it was placed in the Pollock Theater Collection to make room for a new group of faculty in theater. “By the time the ‘60s were over, Howard had an almost completely new and younger drama department,” she says. “They had new ideas and the Oscar represented the old.”
Professor Carter says researching the Oscar’s story was actually “fun,” but it was also the kind of investigative work that lawyers are uniquely trained to do. “It was not just researching facts, but relating disparate facts to each other and analyzing their meanings,” she says. “We used everything from the phone book to the internet and social media to find people for interviews.” She and her assistants also took advantage of the extensive electronic newspaper collections at GW’s Marvin and Estelle Gelman Library and the Library of Congress.
She did find herself in a few tight spots – such as convincing then Dean Gregory Maggs that her trip to view the probate files in Los Angeles needed to include a visit to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood. “Greg didn’t express it, but I could imagine that he was a little skeptical about a proposal that the law school fund a trip for me to go to Hollywood!” Professor Carter laughs.
But fund it he did. The Academy houses the Margaret Herrick Library, which holds papers and photographs of Ms. McDaniel, again only accessible in person. In addition to reviewing those papers, there were two other things that Professor Carter wanted to accomplish there. First, she wanted to see the Academy’s official photographs of that famous Oscar night in 1940. “I had heard rumors that Academy night was segregated,” says Professor Carter. “But some histories report that at least one white person, perhaps her agent, was at Ms. McDaniel’s table; other histories say Ms. McDaniel sat at director David Selznick’s table as a guest. I wanted to see for myself.”
Sure enough, says Professor Carter, the official photo shows Ms. McDaniel and her escort seated alone at a small round table in a sea of long banquet tables end to end. “They were in a corner,” she adds. “If they turned left, they faced the back of a white person sitting at the end of one of the long banquet rows. If they turned right, they faced the stairs. They were the only two blacks in the room, including the servants and the band, and the rest of the Gone with the Wind cast and crew were seated several yards away toward the front center of the room.”
The second thing Professor Carter wanted to see for herself was the type of Oscar Hattie McDaniel actually won. The Academy’s website has a “publicity shot” picture of Ms. McDaniel accepting the traditional tall 13.5 inch Oscar, taken days after she won. But in her day, Best Supporting Actors and Actresses did not win the traditional 13.5 inch tall Oscar, but rather were given Oscar plaques, approximately 5 x 6 and mounted on a stone base.
“There are only a few of those in circulation now and some pictures on the internet, even fakes claiming to be McDaniel’s,” she explains. “I wanted a sense of its weight, whether the engravings or base changed from year to year, that sort of thing. The Academy librarians were very helpful in showing me several examples of what we were looking for.”
Professor W. Burlette Carter
(photo by Claire Duggan)
Professor Carter knows that the book is not closed on Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar story.
“I am hoping that the article will bring some more sources out of the woodwork,” she says. She also notes that there was a lot she had to leave out of the article. “This ‘lost Oscar’ story is larger than Hattie McDaniel,” she says. “It is a story about how slavery and racism and gender discrimination affected the ability of the descendants of slaves to earn wealth, grow wealth, protect it and pass it from generation to generation.”
On the other hand, Professor Carter notes that the story is a metaphor for progress too. “At her death, the Oscar was assessed at ‘no value.’ Today it is estimated to be worth half a million dollars, and I think that’s low. The whole story is a metaphor for where we’ve been—and where we are today in Civil Rights. And maybe the fact that it is lost now, suggests that there is still work to do.”
Part of that work, she suggests, is making sure such artifacts are safe and preserved. “In Hattie McDaniel’s day, most white institutions did not preserve black history, so there are tons of papers, books, artifacts from these earlier eras in the institutions across the country that would accept them. They represent American history, and we need to make sure that they are taken care of.”
Readers might have one final question. Did Professor Carter deliver a mock Oscar acceptance speech when the Academy’s librarians gave her an Oscar to hold in her hands? She laughs, “You know I thought about that. But the Academy knows they have something special, so I had to be very clinical about my examination, you know, to act as if it was no big deal to hold an Oscar in my hands—or to be in a room that had several of the tall Oscars on shelves. So I just played it ‘GW cool.’”