Nina Mae McKinney was called the first black movie star after the release of "Hallelujah." The Daily News of New York claimed she was "an honest-to-goodness screen star-- the first colored girl to attain this distinction." MGM gave her a fiver year contract but the quickly realized that there were no leading roles for black women in the 1930s. Richard Watts of The New York Herald Tribune wrote that her "exile from the cinema is the result entirely of narrow and intolerant racial matters in the 1930's." She ended up moving to Europe where she began a successful musical and theatrical career. However, she stopped performing in the early 1950s, in 1967 she passed away leaving many of her followers in tears. Throughout her career she appeared in more than two dozen films and shorts but about half of those were uncredited parts- as a maid a kind of role she had publicly said she was never going to portray. She appeared in "The Devil's Daughter," "Danger Street," "Pinky," and many more. In 1978 she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.