What Happened to Hattie McDaniel’s Lost Oscar? 

Hattie McDaniel became the first Black woman to receive an acting Oscar in 1940 for her turn as Mammy in 1939's Gone With The Wind, but the award went missing from its resting place at Howard University in the 1970s. Theories abound, but the award has never been found.

In October, a recreation of the original will be gifted to Howard University by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Read on to learn more about McDaniel's win and the theories that have developed over the last 50 years.

Hattie McDaniel's win was historic, but also complex

Though McDaniel made history for being the first Black woman to win an Oscar, the racial climate of the time weighed on her even in the midst of success. At the Oscars ceremony, she was forbidden from being seated with the rest of her white castmates, and instead ascended the stage to accept the award from a separate section at the edge of the room.

Though she wasn't offered many roles outside of a stereotypical maid or servant and was often criticized for perpetuating stereotypes (at the time, the NAACP disowned her due to the nature of her roles), McDaniel had a unique stance on her career. "I can be a maid for $7 a week or I can play a maid for $700 a week," McDaniel told her biographer Jill Watts, according to Vanity Fair.

Positive Black representation in the arts mattered to McDaniel, however. When she won the Oscar in 1940, she said "I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry."

What did Hattie McDaniel do with her Oscar?

McDaniel specified in her last will and testament that her Oscar plaque (supporting actresses received plaques instead of statuettes before World War II) be given to Howard University upon her death. McDaniel had not attended the university, but she was honored there with a celebratory luncheon after her win.

The award didn't go immediately to the school, however. After her death, much of McDaniel's estate was sold to pay back taxes to the IRS. Appraisers had deemed the plaque award worthless after her death. The award was eventually retrieved by McDaniel's friend and actor Leigh Whipper in the early 1960s, who then donated it to the school.

How did Hattie McDaniel's award go missing at Howard University?

At some point in the 1970s, the plaque went missing. The last sighting of McDaniel's award was in 1972, according to The Hollywood Reporter, when it was removed from its resting place in a glass case at Howard University.

Legend has it that the plaque was tossed in the Potomac River during student unrest at the university, which was catalyzed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Some have posited that students removed McDaniel's plaque out of contempt that the first Academy Award was given to a Black woman for playing a servant.

Denise Randle was in charge of Howard's artifact inventory for decades starting in 1972. Randle told NPR in 2015, "At that time, it was 'Black Power, Black Power,' but they may not have understood where she really stood in the film industry and the pioneer that she was."

That theory seems unlikely to W. Burlette Carter, a law school professor who conducted an investigation to find the missing plaque in 2011. She noted in the furnished report of her investigation that the long-held belief that black students were to blame for the missing plaque perpetuated negative stereotypes and was completely fabricated.

Randle offered another hypotheses to NPR: she thinks it's more likely the award was simply misplaced. "I think it was someone who moved it to a safe place, and then didn't tell anyone where they moved it and then since either retired or forgot about it," she said. "But looking at the fine arts department would be the most logical place — we couldn't find it."

Carter echoed that sentiment in her investigation's finding, stating that in her report that the plaque was likely lost due to inadequate record-keeping at the university over the years. She told The Daily Mail that it may even still be somewhere at Howard.

She commented on how mundane this explanation is for what was such a major loss to Black history. "It's a sad story," she told THR, "This Oscar represents a triumph for Blacks — because we can look back and see that things really are so much better now than they were at that time."

Carter told THR that the original plaque, if found today, may be worth half a million dollars.

A new award

As efforts to find McDaniel's plaque have led nowhere, the powers that be have decided to replace it. This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that her award was recreated and would be gifted to Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts on October 1, returning it home for display.

The new Oscar will be given to the university with a ceremony called "Hattie's Come Home," which will be held on Howard's Washington D.C. campus.