IN: Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1895 - October 26, 1952) was an American stage actress, professional singer-songwriter, and comedian. She is best known for her role as "Mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Academy Award won by an African American entertainer. In addition to acting in many films, McDaniel was a radio performer and television star; she was the first black woman to sing on radio in the United States. She appeared in over 300 films, although she received screen credits for only 80 or so.

The whereabouts of McDaniel's Oscar are currently unknown. In 1992, Jet magazine reported that Howard University could not find it and alleged that it had disappeared during protests in the 1960s. In 1998, Howard University stated that it could find no written record of the Oscar having arrived at Howard. In 2007, an article in the Huffington Post repeated rumors that the Oscar had been cast into the Potomac River by angry civil rights protesters in the 1960s. The assertion reappeared in the Huffington Post under the same byline in 2009.  In 2010, Mo'Nique, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, wearing a blue dress and gardenias in her hair, as McDaniel had at the ceremony in 1940, in her acceptance speech thanked McDaniel "for enduring all that she had to so that I would not have to". Her speech revived interest in the whereabouts of McDaniel's plaque. In 2011, J. Freedom duLac reported in the Washington Post that the plaque had disappeared in the 1960s.  In November 2011, W. B. Carter, of the George Washington University Law School, published the results of her year-and-a-half-long investigation into the Oscar's fate. Carter rejected claims that students had stolen the Oscar (and thrown it in the Potomac River) as wild speculation or fabrication that traded on long-perpetuated stereotypes of blacks. She questioned the sourcing of the Huffington Post stories. Instead, she argued that the Oscar was likely returned to Howard University's Channing Pollack Theater Collection between the spring of 1971 and the summer of 1973 or had possibly been boxed and stored in the drama department at that time. The reason for its removal, she argued, was not civil rights unrest but rather efforts to make room for a new generation of black performers. If neither the Oscar nor any paper trail of its ultimate destiny can be found at Howard today, she suggested, inadequate storage or record-keeping in a time of financial constraints and national turbulence may be blamed. She also suggested that a new generation of caretakers may have failed to realize the historic significance of the 5 1/2" x 6" plaque.

What is the McDaniel Oscar?

OUT: 5 1/2" x 6" plaque.


IN: William Henry "Lone Star" Dietz (August 17, 1884 - July 20, 1964) was an American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Washington State University (1915-1917), Purdue University (1921), Louisiana Tech University (1922-1923), University of Wyoming (1924-1926), Haskell Institute--now Haskell Indian Nations University (1929-1932), and Albright College (1937-1942). From 1933 to 1934, Dietz was the head coach of the National Football League's Boston Redskins, where he tallied a mark of 11-11-2. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 2012.

Historian Linda M. Waggoner has traced Dietz' heritage in several articles in Indian Country Today Media Network and at a 2013 symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian. According to census records and to his birth certificate, he was born William Henry Dietz, or "Willie," on August 17, 1884, in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, at 16 West Humbird Street. His father William Wallace Dietz, settled in the area in 1871 and was elected county sheriff in 1877. He married Leanna Ginder in November 1879. "Willie" attended Oklahoma's Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, where it is likely he feigned some kind of Indian identity for the first time. As Waggoner wrote, "Naturally, visitors to the St. Louis World's Fair exhibit, including Dietz's future wife, Winnebago artist Angel De Cora (1871-1919), thought Dietz was a Chilocco student."  In 1921, Dietz took a coaching position with Purdue University in Indiana. After Angel De Cora died in 1919, he married Doris O. Pottlitzer, a middle-aged local journalist, on January 29, 1922. The week previous to their marriage, Purdue officials fired him for illegal recruiting. In spring 1933, George Preston Marshall, owner of the Boston Braves, hired Dietz to replace Coach Lud Wray. In 1937, the team moved to Washington, D.C.  For the rest of his life, Dietz continued to promote himself as Lone Star Dietz, the son of W.W. and Julia One Star of Pine Ridge. He took on his last coaching job in 1937 for Albright College in Pennsylvania; in 1964, still married to Doris, Dietz died in Reading, Pennsylvania. He and Doris were so poor that former teammates purchased his headstone. It reads: "William 'Lone Star' Dietz born in South Dakota."

How did he get involved in sports?

OUT:
He took on his last coaching job in 1937 for Albright College in Pennsylvania;