She won the Academy Award in 1940 and was not allowed to sit with her own cast. The hotel had a no-Black policy. They made an exception for the night so she could attend her own win — and sat her at a small table against the back wall, away from everybody. Hattie McDaniel. She was the first Black person ever nominated for an Oscar, and the first to win one. Her studio had to ask the Ambassador Hotel to let her in the building at all. She came in, sat at a two-person table at the back with her escort, collected the award, gave a short speech, and sat back down at the back. She had also not been permitted to attend the film's premiere in Atlanta the year before. Her face was removed from the programmes distributed there. She spent her career being criticised from inside her own community for playing maids, and answered with the line everyone remembers: that she would rather play a maid for seven hundred dollars a week than be one for seven dollars. Both of those things are true at once, and that is the trap, not her failure. She asked to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery, among the industry she had worked in. The cemetery did not accept Black people. She was buried at Rosedale instead. In 1999 the cemetery's new owner offered to move her. Her family said no — she was where she was. They placed a memorial there instead. Her actual Oscar, which she left to Howard University, has been missing since the 1960s. Nobody knows where it is.