Gone with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

What should be said at Margaret Mitchell's grave

In the past couple of years, whenever I’ve been back in Atlanta giving tours at Oakland Cemetery, I’ve faced a dilemma at Margaret Mitchell’s gravesite. Mitchell (1900-1949) wrote Gone with the Wind, the 1936 Pulitzer prize winning novel turned 1939 global film phenomenon, which depicts life in Georgia during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods and glorifies the antebellum (pre-war) South.

I’ve memorized scripts about Mitchell from both the Love Stories tour and the general tour of the cemetery. The Love Stories text includes a lot of anecdotes about how characters from Gone with the Wind parallel figures from Mitchell’s real romantic life. We learn the best man at Mitchell’s first wedding was her second husband, John Marsh, and that he turned out to be the “best man for her.” We all have a good laugh.

The general tour speaks to Mitchell’s deep family history in Atlanta and the immense popularity of her book, but it ends with this cautionary statement: “Despite its popularity, the novel is one perspective and an inaccurate and harmful depiction of African Americans, enslavement, and the Civil War. Gone With the Wind provides a case study of how storytelling can affect our view of history.”

When I’m giving a tour, I often find myself wanting to bypass this last disclaimer because I know Gone with the Wind is beloved by many and critiquing it may create tension in the tour group. Wouldn’t we all have a better time if we stuck to fun topics like the Scarlett-Rhett-Ashley love triangle? (FYI, if you’re not familiar with the story, Ashley is a man.)

Is it okay if history makes you feel bad?

Of the many executive orders issued by President Trump during his first few weeks in office, one that has caught my attention as a history enthusiast and tour guide is the order issued January 29, 2025, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

The order states that schools are currently indoctrinating students with “radical, anti-American ideologies” without parental oversight.

“In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”

The order provides a definition for “discriminatory equity ideology” and lists many “immoral generalizations” that are promoted by this ideology including:

“An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin, bears responsibility for, should feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of, should be discriminated against, blamed, or stereotyped for, or should receive adverse treatment because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin, in which the individual played no part;”

Romance and Reconstruction

I purchased a hard copy of Gone with the Wind last January, and just this past week, over a year later, I’ve finally finished the 1037 page book! Back in October, while I was still reading it, I visited the Margaret Mitchell House at the Atlanta History Center Midtown. This museum has recently been revamped to tell the broader story of Mitchell’s work and its impact.

My big takeaway from the museum was that although Mitchell strived for accuracy, the sources she consulted were problematic, especially with regards to what happened during Reconstruction, the time period after the war when Black people were given citizenship and the right to vote. Mitchell grew up in the Jim Crow South and was steeped in Lost Cause ideology. For a large part of her childhood, she thought the South had won the Civil War. The academics whose work she studied, researchers who were part of the Dunning school, argued that Reconstruction was a major failure when it wasn’t.

One of the hottest chapters of the book re: love triangle (Scarlett and Ashley share an adulterous kiss) also turns out to also have a lot to say about what was happening during Reconstruction. This history is not presented from the perspective of Scarlett, the novel’s protagonist, who readers might expect to have racist views, but from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who appears to be recalling historical truths. Here’s how the Freedman’s Bureau, the organization set up to help newly emancipated Black people, is presented:

“This [Freedman’s] Bureau, organized by the Federal government to take care of the idle and excited ex-slaves, was drawing them from the plantations into the villages and cities by the thousands. The Bureau fed them while they loafed and poisoned their minds against their former owners…

They kept the negroes stirred up with tales of cruelty perpetuated by the whites and, in a section long famed for the affectionate relations between slaves and slave owners, hate and suspicion began to grow.”

Much later in the book, after Scarlett is married to Rhett Butler, the omniscient narrator gives us an update on race relations in Georgia and mentions that Black people have been elected to the Georgia legislature. Here’s how these men, today referred to as the Original 33, are described in Gone with the Wind:

“These negroes sat in the legislature where they spent most of their time eating goobers [peanuts?] and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes. Few of them could read or write.”

I’m not sure about the literacy status of the Original 33, but what I do know is that if they were illiterate it was because during the time of slavery in Georgia it was illegal to teach Black people to read or write. This fact isn’t mentioned in the book as far as I can recall.

After the war, Scarlett relies on convict labor to staff the mills she owns. Today, we recognize convict labor as slavery by another name. Pretty much everyone in the book is against Scarlett using this type of labor on account of the poor treatment faced by convicts. When Scarlett sells her share of the mills to Ashley, thanks to some behind the scenes maneuvering by Rhett, Ashley says he will no longer use convict laborers.

Ashley: “I can’t make money from the enforced labor and misery of others.”

Scarlett: “But you owned slaves!”

Ashley: “They weren’t miserable.”

One of the major problems with Gone with the Wind is that it depicts slavery with rose tinted glasses. The Black characters who are shown respect, Mammy and Peter, are held in esteem because of the devotion they show to their former slaveholders after the war. What I’ve shared here is just a small sampling of the disturbing views of slavery and the underestimation of the intelligence of Black people presented in Gone with the Wind. I’m currently on a hold list to borrow the ebook from my Western Massachusetts library because I want to search the text to see how many times the word “impudent” is used to describe Black people. Two weeks after placing a hold for the ebook, I’m eighth in line with a predicted 8 week wait, which goes to show how popular this text remains.

Patriotic education

According to his executive order, Trump is trying to rid public education of “anti-American ideology” and instead instill “patriotic eduction.” Among other things, patriotic education is defined as one that’s grounded in “a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.”

But it hasn’t always grown closer. The United States was founded on the idea of liberty, but at its founding, these freedoms were only guaranteed to white men. Slavery was abolished around eighty years later during the Civil War, and Black men were given the right to vote with the 15th amendment, but these freedoms were eroded by the convict labor system, segregation, and Jim Crow laws that prevented Black men from voting and being elected as representatives. Progress toward our “noble principles” has not been linear.

A plane crash and DEI

In the wake of the tragic plane crash that occurred in Washington D.C. on January 29th of this year, both Trump and JD Vance (the vice president) attributed blame for the crash to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. In doing this, they sought to depict the American workforce as one that’s become more inept because historically marginalized groups have been given greater access to positions of power. This implies that individuals from these groups are less intelligent, less deserving, would never have been placed in these positions if things were decided solely on “merit.”

Margaret Mitchell grew up in a society where Black people were segregated, denied the right to vote, and not given equal access to education. Whether she personally believed these policies were justified or not, the way the majority of Black characters are depicted in Gone with the Wind rationalizes the inequalities she would have witnessed. The “ex-slaves” in her words were “idle,” “excited,” “impudent,” they “loafed,” and the leaders among them who sat on the legislature “spent most of their time eating goobers.”

I can not and will not believe if our society prioritizes equitable access to opportunity for diverse groups that we will end up with anything less than the best we have to offer.

Whose comfort?

I mentioned at the beginning of this post the dilemma I face at Margaret Mitchell’s gravesite. Do I bring up the criticisms of Gone with the Wind and risk causing tension in the tour group?

The answer is I do. I share that Gone with the Wind is “one perspective and an inaccurate and harmful depiction of African Americans, enslavement, and the Civil War” because: (1) I want to keep my volunteer gig and 2) prioritizing the comfort of people who don’t want to discuss the problematic parts of Gone with the Wind might cause discomfort to people who want these critiques acknowledged. Whose comfort matters more?

I don’t think history needs to make us feel bad, but I do think it needs to make us feel critical. We need to be able to acknowledge the contradiction in our nation being founded on the principle of freedom but drawing much of its initial wealth from enslaved labor and the illegal seizure of land from native populations. We just do.

The world as it is

One theme from Gone with the Wind that resonated with me is that you have to accept the world for what it is and not what it might have been. The characters who succeed in the book are the ones who are able to adapt to a new way of living. The tide seems to be turning away from diversity, equity, and inclusion, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be swept back to sea with it. We can hold on to our values, we can call out historical revisionism, and unlike Rhett Butler, we can give a damn.

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Sources:

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York, New York, Warner Books, 1999.

Executive Order No. 14190, 90 FR 8853. “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” January 29, 2025.