It would be easy here to fall into a nostalgia trap that glorifies the past and glosses over its unpleasantries. It’s the same impulse that makes some people wish we could wear flouncy hats and drink tea with Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess as Carson clucks disapprovingly in the background, all while completely disregarding the fact that a large chunk of the British population still lived in abject poverty in the years following World War I.

But back to Hattie McDaniel. The daughter of two former slaves, she became one of the most famous Black actresses in Hollywood.

Well, that’s one narrative.

Here’s the other: A couple of months before taking home her Oscar, McDaniel was barred from the Atlanta premiere of her own soon-to-be-blockbuster movie. Segregation laws made it illegal for her to enter the “Whites Only” theater.

In fact, her Oscars speech, in which she thanked the Academy for “one of the happiest moments of my life,” was written for her by the studio and included this phrase: “I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.”

Obviously, as Bennett writes in his HuffPo letter to McDaniel, a lot has changed since 1939:

“Much of American society is desegregated and we have full voting rights now, but as you might imagine, we still have pockets of society resistant to this newer reality, but that probably comes as no surprise.

"We have an African American president now, how cool is that? And just to let you know, he’s done an amazing job despite strong resistance from an opposing party hell-bent on destroying his many accomplishments using coded racial language as a tool. It’s a language more reminiscent of the blunt racist attitudes of 1940.”