Hattie McDaniel‘s long-lost Oscars trophy will finally be replaced by the Academy, decades after it went missing.
The Academy announced Tuesday it will present the Howard University Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts with a replacement plaque, roughly 50 years after the disappearance of the Gone With the Wind star’s history-making original Best Supporting Actress honor she won in 1940.
Upon winning the award — which, at the time, was presented as a gilded plaque, as opposed to the Oscars statuette we know today — McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Academy Award (Sidney Poitier became the second in 1964), and would remain the only Black actress to win one until Whoopi Goldberg won in the same category for Ghost in 1991.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; Owen Kolasinski / ©Academy Museum Foundation Hattie McDaniel’s replacement Oscars statuette.
The presentation is set for Oct. 1 at a special ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home,” and will take place at the university’s Ira Aldridge Theater in Washington, D.C., with actress and Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts Dean Phylicia Rashad speaking during the event.
“When I was a student in the College of Fine Arts at Howard University, in what was then called the Department of Drama, I would often sit and gaze in wonder at the Academy Award that had been presented to Ms. Hattie McDaniel, which she had gifted to the College of Fine Arts,” said Rashad in a press statement. “I am overjoyed that this Academy Award is returning to what is now the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. This immense piece of history will be back in the College of Fine Arts for our students to draw inspiration from. Ms. Hattie is coming home!”
Kobal/Shutterstock Hattie McDaniel.
Following McDaniel’s death in 1952, her will made a request that Howard University receive her Oscar plaque, though it went missing by the 1970s. As indicated in a prior EW report, rumors regularly swirled about the plaque’s whereabouts, ranging from theories about it being stolen to speculation that it was thrown into the nearby Potomac River during protests erupting after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.
“We hold the hope that we’ll find it someday,” historian W. Burlette Carter told EW of her extensive search for the plaque. “Not so much because of Hattie McDaniel, but because the Oscar really represents black America overall. It represents the experience of being shut out for such a long time.”
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