In 1939, the film Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. The legendary novel on which it was based had appeared three years earlier, and its author, Margaret Mitchell, was a fierce defender of the traditional South. Indeed, as a child she had happily assumed that the Confederacy had won the Civil War. The theaters in Atlanta were segregated in 1939, and Hattie McDaniel, who was to win an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind, was forbidden to enter the privileged whites-only theaters. Even so, some African-American children were permitted to see Gone With the Wind in this venue. Dressed in "pickaninny" costumes, they were on stage as part of the entertainment for the white audience. Martin Luther King, Jr., then ten years old, was among them.
-- Stimpson, in "Series Editor's Foreword," Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (U Chicago P, 1999).
This anecdote brings it all together: the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement.... ties it all together with a nice King-sized bow.
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