Sunday night, costume designer Ruth E. Carter became the first black woman to win multiple Academy Awards.
In 2019, she won an Oscar for best costume design for Black Panther, and now she is taking home another Oscar for best costume design for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
During her acceptance speech Sunday, she thanked her late mother, Mabel Carter, and asked the late actor Chadwick Boseman to look out for her.
“Thank you to the Academy for recognizing the superhero that is a Black woman. She endures. She loves. She overcomes. She is every woman in this film. She is my mother. This past week Mabel Carter became an ancestor. This film prepared me for this moment. Chadwick, please take care of mom.”
As the first Black woman to win two Oscars in the award show’s 95-year history, she continued to reflect on her win.
“I wanted to be a costume designer,” she said. “I studied. I scraped. I dealt with adversity in the industry that sometimes didn’t look like me and endured. I feel that this win opens the door for other young costume designers that may not think that this industry is for them, and hopefully, they’ll see me, they’ll see my story, and they’ll think they can win an Oscar, too.”
Carter now joins the list of Black Oscar winners with two awards, including Denzel Washington, Mahershala Ali, Willie D. Burton, and Russell Williams II.
