Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

We're right back into our conversations about the new series that I worked on,

Death on the Lot, hosted by Adam McKay. I was the editor on this series,

Death on the Lot, which looks at changes and tragedy in Hollywood to help explain

the way the country as a whole was transformed in the 40s and 50s after World War II.

Last episode we talked about unions being corrupted and red-bated in this era.

There are other episodes of death on a lot about the treatment of women in Hollywood and

the changing nature of fame and James Dean and Method acting and lots more it's a really great

series and there is also an episode about race and civil rights told through the

story of one actress whose name you may know, Hattie McDaniel.

Hattie McDaniel was the first black person

to win an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind.

She'd kind of carved out a role in Hollywood

for portraying maids and mammy's. The mammy was a trope that often

reinforced a lot of racist stereotypes though Hattie put her own spin on those

roles and those roles were really the only ones that were available to her

when she was building her

career as an actress in the 30s and 40s. But she wins the Oscar, a trailblazing

moment, and then kind of nothing. Her career kind of stalls out. She doesn't get much more work and she also starts to

get criticized by members of the burgeoning civil rights movement for those roles that she had taken on which

they saw as portraying racist stereotypes.

...