The Long Battle Over ‘Gone with the

Wind’
The 1939 blockbuster once symbolized the ultimate in mass entertainment. But
African Americans have protested against it from the start, even if white America
didn’t want to hear it.

By Jennifer Schuessler
• Published June 14, 2020Updated June 15, 2020

When HBO Max announced Tuesday that it was temporarily removing “Gone With
the Wind” from its streaming service, it seemed as if another Confederate monument
was coming down.

“Gone With the Wind” may register with younger people today only as their
grandmother’s favorite movie (or maybe, the source of a lacerating joke that opens
Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”). And for every prominent conservative accusing
HBO Max of censorship, there were plenty on social media calling the movie, well,
boring.

But the 1939 classic — still the highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation —
has enduringly shaped popular understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction
perhaps more than any other cultural artifact.

“You want to have a Southern antebellum wedding — where does that come from?”
said Kellie Carter Jackson, a historian at Wellesley College who teaches a course on
slavery and film. “People will say they haven’t seen the movie. But they have seen it
— just not in its original form.”

HBO Max’s move came a day after The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece
by John Ridley, the screenwriter of “Twelve Years a Slave,” criticizing “Gone With
the Wind” for its racist stereotypes and whitewashing of the horrors of slavery, and
calling for it to be presented only with added historical context. (A few days later, the
African-American film scholar Jacqueline Stewart announced in an opinion piece for
CNN.com that she will be providing the introduction when the movie returns to the
streaming service.)

But it also represents a belated reckoning with African-American criticism that

started immediately after the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell’s novel — even
if it was barely noted in the mainstream white press.

“Gone With the Wind” is one of the mythic lightning strikes of American cultural
history. Mitchell, a former journalist who wrote the novel (her first and only) while
recovering from an injury, expected it to sell 5,000 copies. Instead, it became a
sensation, selling nearly a million copies within six months, and earning her the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The production of the movie version, including the casting of Scarlett O’Hara and
Rhett Butler, was covered breathlessly in the press. And by opening night, in 1939,
seven million copies of the book had been sold.

The frenzy around the novel and the movie also touched off a national craze for all
things Dixie. Mitchell was inundated with requests to authorize “Gone With the
Wind”-themed pens, hats, dolls, even chintz fabric. In 1939, Macy’s devoted several
floors of its flagship store to products associated with the film, under the theme “The
Old South Comes North.”

“People just ate it up,” said Karen L. Cox, a historian at the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte, and the author of “Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was
Created in American Popular Culture.” And the Northern embrace of Mitchell’s
plantation nostalgia, with its depiction of happy, obedient slaves, wasn’t just
harmless lifestyle consumerism.

“There was nascent civil rights activity in the 1930s, but if everyone is watching this
movie or reading this book, they get the idea that that’s how things were,” Cox said.
“It made it easier for white Northerners to look at African-American migrants
arriving in places like Chicago and say, ‘Why can’t you act like these Negroes?’”

But even as white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias, African-
Americans were registering objections. Soon after the producer David O. Selznick
bought the rights, there were complaints that a movie version would incite violence,
spread bigotry and even derail a proposed federal anti-lynching bill.

Margaret Mitchell reacted dismissively to the criticism. “I do not intend to let any
trouble-making Professional Negros change my feelings towards the race with whom
my relations have always been those of affection and mutual respect,” she wrote to a
friend.

Selznick did a more complicated dance. “I for one have no desire to produce any anti-
Negro film,” he wrote in a memo to the screenwriter Sidney Howard. “In our picture
I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right
side of the ledger.”

In 1936, Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, wrote to him expressing concern,
and suggesting he hire someone, preferably an African-American, to check “possible
errors” of fact and interpretation. “The writing of history of the Reconstruction
periodhas been so completely confederatized during the last two or three generations
that we naturally are somewhat anxious,” he wrote.
Selznick initially floated the name of one potential African-American adviser, but
ultimately hired two whites, including a journalist friend of Mitchell’s, tasked with
keeping the Southern speech authentic (a matter of great concern to some white fans
of the novel who wrote to Selznick) and avoiding missteps on details like the
appropriateness of Scarlett’s headgear at an evening party.

The film tried to sanitize some of the novel’s racist elements. References to the Ku
Klux Klan, which the novel calls “a tragic necessity,” were omitted. Reluctantly,
Selznick also cut from the script a common but notorious racial slur (“the hate word,”
as one African-American journalist who weighed in put it).

The film also finessed a scene from the book where Scarlett, while riding alone
through a shantytown, is nearly raped by a black man, which prompts a retaliatory
raid by the Klan. Instead, the attacker is a poor white man, and the nature of the
posse that rides out to avenge her honor is not specified.

“A group of men can go out and ‘get’ the perpetrators of an attempted rape without
having long white sheets over them,” Selznick wrote in a memo.

But the film put the nostalgic Lost Cause mythology — by that point, the dominant
national view of the Civil War — front and center, starting with the opening title
cards paying tribute to “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” a “pretty world where
Gallantry took its last bow.”

Even during production, there were calls for an African-American boycott.

Afterward, there were protests outside theaters in Chicago, Washington and other
cities.

While responses to the finished film in the black press were mixed, the criticism was
harsh. The Chicago Defender initially published a column calling it inoffensive and
the performances of Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy)
examples of “Negro artistry.” But a week later, it ran a scathing review calling it “a
weapon of terror against black America,” a sentiment echoed in other black papers
like the Pittsburgh Courier, which denounced the depiction of all blacks as “happy
house servants and unthinking, helpless clods.”

Among those who saw it around this time was a teenage Malcolm X. “I was the only
Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like
crawling under the rug,” he wrote in his autobiography.

White audiences, meanwhile, were largely swept up in celebration of the nearly four-
hour Technicolor epic, with its hundreds of extras, lavish costumes and themes of
grit and survival that resonated with a country emerging from the Depression.

White newspapers, including The New York Times, carried rapturous coverage of the
movie’s premieres in New York and Atlanta, where the four days of festivities
included the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir (including, one film scholar has noted, a
10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.) singing in front of a mock-up of Tara, the film’s
plantation. But few noted the African-American protests, or any black criticism at
all.

Even past the 1960s, the film endured for many white Americans as a beloved
cultural touchstone, a symbol of golden age Hollywood — and even American
identity itself.

In 1974, NBC paid a record-smashing $5 million dollars (more than $26 million
today) for the right to show the film once, as part of its Bicentennial programming.
Broadcast over two nights, it was watched by 47 percent of all American households.

Some African-American artists have made direct challenges to its whitewashed

nostalgia. In 2001, the Mitchell estate fought a losing copyright battle against “The
Wind Done Gone,” the novelist Alice Randall’s parody from the point of view of the
enslaved. The authorized sequels, meanwhile, have tried, sometimes awkwardly, to
update the book’s racial politics, while keeping the white-centered romance intact.

In Alexandra Ripley’s “Scarlett,” from 1991, Scarlett lovingly tends to the dying
Mammy, who is ushered offstage (along with most of the black characters) early
on. “Rhett Butler’s People,” by Donald McCaig, from 2007, focused on the post-Civil
War struggle over the re-establishment of white supremacy, but glossed over the
issue of the Klan (and Rhett’s possible membership).

Other institutions have changed their approaches. Since the Atlanta History Center
took over the Margaret Mitchell House from a private group in 2006, the focus has
shifted from a literary view that downplayed racial controversy to an emphasis on
the story’s racist tropes and distorted history — and the fact that African-Americans
objected from the beginning.

Jessica VanLanDuyt, the center’s vice president for guest experience, said the house
has seen declining visitor numbers in recent years, though there remains a strong
contingent from other countries where “Gone With the Wind” is popular.

But even in America, it retains its allure, including among audiences “who know
better,” as the New York Times critic Vincent Canby put it in a mostly rapturous 1998
reassessment of the movie.

Jackson, the Wellesley historian, said students usually come to her class having
never seen the film. But it ends up being one of the offerings they respond to the
most.

“Students will say, ‘I love ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘I hate ‘Gone With the Wind,’”
she said. “They love the aesthetics, which are so over the top, it’s like candy. But they
know I’m going to make them dig deeper. And when they do, they say, ‘This is awful.’”