The 80th Academy Awards broadcast is scheduled to air Sunday, Feb. 24, unless it becomes another casualty of the Writers Guild strike. Denver Magazine ® honors the late African-American actress Hattie McDaniel, who spent much of her childhood in Denver before becoming the first black actor to win an Oscar.

Born in Wichita, Kan. (reports vary on her year of birth between 1892 and 1895), McDaniel and her family moved to Colorado's predominantly white capital soon after.

McDaniel's father was a former slave who fought for the Union army during the Civil War. A singer, dancer and comedienne, McDaniel, one of 13 children, left high school to sing in a band.

She had many performing milestones in her career: Besides winning the best supporting actress Oscar in 1939 for her role as the maid, Mammy, in the Civil War era epic, Gone With the Wind, McDaniel is believed to be the first black woman to sing on the radio (in 1915, with Professor George Morrison's Negro Orchestra in Denver, according to www.imdb.com); the first black to attend the Academy Awards as a guest – not a servant, and the first black person to be buried in Los Angeles' Rosedale Cemetery, following her death from breast cancer on Oct. 26, 1952.

After she died, during the 1960s, McDaniel's image was tarnished as civil rights activists ridiculed her and other black actors for playing servant roles. Her most famous quote, believed to have been made after receiving her Oscar, served as the perfect response to her later critics.

"I'd rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid," she said.

McDaniel willed her Oscar to Howard University, but it was lost and never recovered, during the Washington, D.C., race riots. In January, 2006, the United States Postal Service honored McDaniel with a postage stamp as part of its Black Heritage series.