Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello and welcome to the show. Today it is just me, Beckett, with a follow-up minicast episode 49, Gone with the Wind.

This time I would love to tell you all about the life of Hadi McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her 1939 portrayal of a mummy in that oh so famous movie.

So let's start.

Hadi was born on June 10th, 1893, the youngest of the 13 children of Susan, who was Bart McDaniel and Henry McDaniel. Both of them had been slaves.

Papa Henry thought he might have been born at some point around 1838, he never remembered ever having parents of his own.

He was sold at about age 9 to a planter named John McDaniel from whom he took his name and lived there in Tennessee for another 10 years or so.

The Civil War started, and really there's no impact for a while until the Union Army finally got close enough in 1863, so there was this great wave of slave defections to join the service and fight on the Union side.

And despite the fact that he served valiantly and he was wounded very grievously, he had to fight for the most meniscul of pensions for the rest of his life.

Bureau of received demanded papers that he just simply had no way of having. He had been a slave, he doesn't have a proof of birth, he doesn't have any of that stuff.

He was treated very horribly, he was not alone, many, many black soldiers were treated equally horribly, I'm sorry to say. It's very shameful.

This is the point at which he met his future wife Susan Hobart, who already had some children. They met and married and the family moved from Tennessee where the aftermath of the war was so dangerous and oppressive for the newly freed black population to the Promised Land of Kansas City, the very edge of the Wild West.

And then pushed further to Manhattan, Kansas, and Wichita, my hometown, the opportunities just weren't there, prejudice was just everywhere no matter where you went.

And in an era and a place where the only jobs for black men were grinding, meaning a laborer, proposing increasingly debilitated condition made him unfit to work.

And by the time Hadi was born, six of the children had died, her family was living in desperate poverty, malnourished, no shoes, no heat, it was horrible.

So when she was five, the family followed a couple of Hadi's married sisters out to Denver, which had this reputation as a more egalitarian place as the West often was for both women and minorities.

There were black doctors there, one was a woman. There were black millionaires, one of them was a woman named CJ Walker, who had a beauty product empire.

So the schools were integrated there, and Little Hadi was enrolled in the 24th Street School, which I can't tell if it's still there, I don't think so, but I've put a photo of it on our Pinterest board.

It's a very beautiful building. Beautiful on the inside too, because it's integrated school, pretty rare.

The family joined a church where all the medallion sang in the choir and became part of the closely knit black community in Denver.

But as the black population grew, so did the oppression. Papaa finally got his pension, but it was just not enough.

Mama had to go out as a domestic servant and so did Hadi's sisters, as they got old enough.

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