Gone With the Wind Once Stirred Fears of Violence
Gone With the Wind conquered the cinematic world the way General Sherman crushed Atlanta during the Civil War as depicted in the epic that debuted 75 years ago. The film Hollywood lavished with 10 Oscars is still among the highest grossing and, more significantly, considered among the best ever made.
For much of the black press other than the Atlanta Daily World, however, the film was unwelcome and even loathed. Starting with the announcement in 1936 that David O. Selznick had secured film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, writers chronicled, criticized and kibitzed through its premiere in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 1939, and its release around the country in 1940. Many of those writing in newspapers and magazines feared Gone With the Wind would set the race back years, anticipating a repeat of the devastating impact of Birth of a Nation, a previous cinematic wonder purporting to offer an accurate portrayal of the South in the era of slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction.
Gone With the Wind is a paean to a mythologized past: a genteel South where lords and ladies of the manor presided over plantation fiefdoms maintained by the labor of enslaved blacks. It follows the romantic misadventures and wanton scheming of Scarlett O’Hara, who meets her match in the swashbuckling mercenary Rhett Butler.
The headline for Melvin B. Tolson’s “Caviar and Cabbage” column in the Washington Tribune gave fair warning to the erudite filmgoer with a sense of history: “‘Gone With the Wind’ is More Dangerous than ‘Birth of a Nation’.” Tolson was a highly regarded poet whom Langston Hughes proclaimed “the most famous Negro professor in the Southwest,” where Tolson taught English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. The storied achievements of the debate teams he coached were depicted in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington as Tolson. In a critique that is still widely read in film history classes, Tolson declared: “’The Birth of a Nation’ was such a barefaced lie that a moron could see through it. ‘Gone With the Wind’ is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of whites and blacks alike.”1
A generation earlier, Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle and a leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had sounded the alarm from the time production of Birth of a Nation was announced in 1914. The silent photo-play, as it was called, was adapted from The Clansman, the second novel in an incendiary trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr., an unabashed segregationist who believed that freeing the slaves had been a grave mistake. Like the novel, the film
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By E. R. Shipp