12 Wild Oscar Conspiracy Theories People Actually Believe

Hattie McDaniel made Oscar history when she won Best Supporting Actress for her role as housemaid and former slave Mammy in the classic epic Gone with the Wind, becoming the first black actor to win an Academy Award.

Considering this was back in 1940 when racial segregation was still in force in the US, it was a more than momentous occasion. In fact during the ceremony at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, which then operated a strict no-blacks policy but made a ‘special’ allowance for McDaniel, she was forced to sit at the back of the ballroom away from all the white audience members.

After her death in 1952 she bequeathed the Oscar to Washington DC’s Howard University, one of the USA’s oldest historically black educational institutions, but oddly enough considering the award’s importance it hasn’t been seen for around forty or fifty years.

Although the official line is that the Oscar was lost somewhere in the university’s storage, others have claimed that it was thrown in the Potomac River during the late 1960s by civil rights protestors angered at the stereotyped role McDaniel won the award for.

Whatever happened, the whereabouts of McDaniel’s momentous award remain a mystery today.