She found it difficult finding work as an actress. She was often typecast in roles as maids and said, “I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”

[b.1911 – d.1995]

Thelma McQueen (an only child) was born in Tampa, Florida. Her father was a stevedore and mother worked as a maid.

She studied dance with Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Janet Collins. The “Butterfly” stage name, derives from dancing the “Butterfly Ballet” in a 1935 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Her stage debut was in “Brown Sugar,” directed by George Abbott for whom she did several other stage shows. In 1939 she appeared as the shop girls’ assistant Lulu in “The Women” (1939) and in her most famous role, as the slave Prissy in “Gone with the Wind” (1939).

Interested in purchasing some new furniture, she auditioned for the part of the slave Prissy, and was initially rejected as too old, too plump and too dignified.

Years later she said, “Now I am happy I did Gone with the Wind. I wasn’t when I was 28, but it’s part of black history. You have no idea how hard it is for black actors, but things change, things blossom in time”.

She quit acting in movies in 1947 to avoid further typecasting, although she returned as a maid on the TV show “Beulah” in 1950-1953. She appeared occasionally on Broadway, and supported herself in a succession of jobs as a real-life maid, a companion to an elderly white woman, a taxi dispatcher, a saleslady at Macy’s, and a seamstress at Sak’s.

She returned to films in 1974, playing Clarice in “Amazing Grace” and Ma Kennywick in “Mosquito Coast” in 1986 with Harrison Ford. That same year she appeared in a PBS version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

She was a continual student, taking classes at five universities and even reading “Gone with the Wind” in Spanish. In 1975, at the age of 64, Ms. McQueen received a bachelor’s degree in political science from New York City College.

In 1980, a Greyhound Bus Lines guard mistook her for a pickpocket and handled her roughly, throwing her against a bench and cracking several of her ribs. She sued for assault, and after several years of litigation, was awarded $60,000.

Although she was raised a Christian, she began to question the value of organized religion as a child. She related one eye-opening experience with clergy as a youngster, when she was riding a train to New York and offered to share her lunch with two young preachers. Instead of taking “one sandwich and one piece of cake, they took the whole thing.”

In 1989 she told a reporter from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution her views on religion and her atheism:

“As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.”
Christianity and studying the bible has “sapped our minds so we don’t know anything else.”

“If we had put the energy on earth and on people that we put on mythology and on Jesus Christ, we wouldn’t have any hunger or homelessness.” She said she tithed not to religion but “to my friends,” spending her energy cleaning up the slums.

“They say the streets are going to be beautiful in heaven. I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. At least, in Georgia and in New York, I live on beautiful streets. “When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.”

In 1995 she died tragically of second and third degree burns over 70% of her body when her clothes caught fire while she was lighting a kerosene heater.

Bio:Freedom From Religion Foundation
Photo: Courtesy of Stephen Bourne