Yo, man.

He's out here just here.

Yes.

Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring

the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.

I'm your host, Kareena Longworth.

Today, we bring you another episode of our ongoing series, Six Degrees of Song of the South.

Today, we are going to talk about one of the most significant figures in Black Hollywood

of the first half of the 20th century.

The daughter of former slaves.

In 1940, Hadi McDaniel became the first Black performer to be nominated for and win an

Oscar for her role as the slave, Mami, in Gone with the Wind.

By 1939, Hadi had been playing versions of Mami for decades.

Mami was shorthand for a type of caricature popularized in Blackface minstrel shows.

Blackface shows began before the Civil War as a phenomenon of cultural appropriation.

They featured white performers in Blackface, cycling through a number of impressions of

different stereotypes of Black people for the amusement of white audiences.

Later, Black performers began creating their own minstrel shows, often adopting the tropes

invented by whites, including in some cases, Blackface or even Whiteface, to create subversive,

satirical entertainments that white audiences received one way, and Black audiences received

another.

The history of minstrelcy is thus very, very complicated.

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