182 Racism, History, and “Gone With The Wind” + This Week in US History

This week at In The Past Lane, the American History podcast, we learn about the film “Gone With The Wind,” its dark racist themes, and how African Americans organized protests against the film when it debuted in 1939.

And we also take a look at some key events that occurred this week in US history, like the landmark Supreme Court decision, Marbury vs. Madison, the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee by members of the American Indian Movement, and the swearing in of Hiram Revels as the first African American member of the U.S. And birthdays, including

February 24, 1928: Michael Harrington
February 26, 1846: Buffalo Bill
February 27, 1902: Marian Anderson

For more information about the In The Past Lane podcast, head to our website, www.InThePastLane.com 

Feature Story: Racism, History, and “Gone With The Wind”

Eighty years ago this week, on February 29, 1940, the film "Gone with the Wind" swept the Academy Awards. The blockbuster film, one of several classics to come out in the remarkable year of 1939 (which also included "Stagecoach" and "The Wizard of Oz"), was based on the best-selling book by Margaret Mitchell. 

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900.  Her parents imparted to her very different influences. From her father, a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society, she grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and glories of the Confederacy.  From her mother, a women of more radical leanings who was active in the suffrage movement, Mitchell developed her independent personality. After studying briefly at Smith College in Massachusetts, she returned to Atlanta and became one of the first women to land a job as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal.  In 1925 she married John Marsh and one year later, while recovering from an ankle injury, she began writing a work of fiction that became Gone with the Wind.

Mitchell actually finished the 1,000-page manuscript in 1926, but had trouble finding a publisher.  The book was finally published in 1935 and became an instant hit, selling one million copies within six months.  The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize.  By the time of her death in 1949, more than eight million copies had been sold in forty different countries.

The essential story is by now familiar to most.  In the beginning, the reader is immersed in a idyllic world of the antebellum South and the plantation-owning elite.  But when the Civil War breaks out, the brave sons of the South march off to fight the Yanks and the old South begins to crumble.  Within this drama is the story of the tempestuous Scarlett O'Hara and her fight both to save her family plantation, the much-loved Tara, and to win the heart of the strong and dashing Rhett Butler.

With the success of the book, a film adaptation was inevitable.  Mitchell sold the film rights to the producer David O. Selznick for $50,000, and later received another $50,000 in royalties. News of the forthcoming film generated a lot of excited anticipation among fans of the book. But not all Americans were thrilled. African Americans rightly understood Mitchell’s book as a deeply racist depiction of a “Lost Cause” version of slavery, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction. In her telling, enslaved African Americans were simple-minded people who were content with slavery and loved their white owners. And she celebrated the Ku Klux Klan as an organization that rescued the South from the alleged depredations of emancipated blacks and Northern carpetbaggers.

African Americans knew that it was this twisted version of the Civil War and Reconstruction that was used by white supremacists to justify Jim Crow, lynching, and segregation. So, they mobilized against GWTW long before the filming began. They wrote letters to David Selznick, the film’s famed producer, urging him to drop the project. "We consider this work to be a glorification of the old rotten system of slavery, propaganda for race-hatreds and bigotry, and incitement of lynching," wrote one group from Pittsburgh. Several African American newspapers threatened to organize a boycott of not just GWTW, but any film made by Selznick. The pressure didn’t stop the film from being made, but it did convince Selznick to – very reluctantly – delete the n-word from the script.

GWTW premiered on December 15, 1939 in Atlanta and quickly broke all existing box office records. For white Americans, the film represented a compelling fusion of romance and history. For many African Americans, however, GWTW was just what they feared it would be: a racist technicolor extravaganza that told a white supremacist version of the history of slavery, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction. It was, they charged, nothing more than a milder and prettier version of the original American blockbuster, The Birth of A