Academy Awards

Awards given yearly by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize significant achievement in filmmaking. From 1929, the first year the awards were given, to 2002, African Americans won eight Academy Awards, also known as “Oscars,” in major categories and three honorary awards.

The first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award was also the first to win—actress Hattie McDaniel, who won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind. Announcing the award, white actress Fay Bainter called it “a tribute to a country where people are free to honor noteworthy achievements regardless of creed, race, or color.”

Academy Award winners Denzel Washington and Halle Berry after winning Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars for 2001. Since 1939, when actress Hattie McDaniel won a Best Supporting Actress award for her role in Gone With the Wind, relatively few black performers have been nominated for Academy Awards, and only a handful have won. The first black actor to win a Best Actor award was Sidney Poitier in 1963. Several performers have won Best-Supporting awards, including Lou Gossett Jr., Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cuba Gooding Jr. With her victory in 2001, Halle Berry became the first African American actress to win the Best Actress Award, while Denzel Wahington became the first black actor to win both a Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor award.

Kevin Sullivan/Orange County Register/Corbis; used by permission.

Twenty-four years would pass before another African American won an Academy Award in a competitive category. The only African Americans nominated for their film work in the 1940s and 1950s were Ethel Waters as Best Supporting Actress for Pinky (1949), Dorothy Dandridge as Best Actress for Carmen Jones (1954), Sidney Poitier as Best Actor for The Defiant Ones (1958), and Juanita Moore as Best Supporting Actress for Imitation of Life (1959). None of them won. In 1948, an honorary Academy Award was given to black actor James Baskett for his “able [Page 8]and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus,” the friend and storyteller to children in Walt Disney's partially animated movie Song of the South.

Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor award on his second nomination, for the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field, in which he played an itinerant ex-GI who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel in the southwestern United States. In his acceptance speech, Poitier alluded to the lack of recognition for black actors before him, commenting that “it has been a long journey to this moment.”

African Americans were nominated for Academy Awards seven more times in the 1960s and 1970s, but did not win a single award. The 1972 Academy Awards were notable for the nomination of three African Americans for major awards: Paul Winfield as Best Actor for Sounder and Diana Ross and Cicely Tyson as Best Actress for Lady Sings the Blues and Sounder, respectively.

The next African American Academy Award victory went to Louis Gossett Jr., for his supporting performance as a tough marine drill instructor in the 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentleman. Over the next two decades, African Americans won three more times for supporting performances. Denzel Washington won as Best Supporting Actor for Glory (1989), playing a runaway slave who joins a Union infantry brigade during the Civil War. Whoopi Goldberg won the Best Supporting Actress award as a phony medium who helps a deceased bank executive communicate with his widow in Ghost (1990). Cuba Gooding Jr. won as Best Supporting Actor playing a football player whose bad attitude hampers his career in Jerry Maguire (1996).

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