well welcome to Margaret Mitchell house uh we are standing at the entrance to apartment number one so this is the apartment where Margaret Mitchell lived with her husband John Marsh from 1925 to 1932 during that time she wrote about 90% of the novel that we know now is Gone With the Wind a lot of people are surprised when they come in and they see that she just lived in a 650t apartment uh this house has been restored uh to maintain the original apartment if you look at the floor here we're actually standing on the original flooring uh this building it was built in 1899 originally a single family home converted into apartments in the 19 and were apartments for tenants all the way up until 1977 so we are at the entrance to telling stories Gone With The Wind in American memory we'll start off learning a bit about Margaret Mitchell her life her influences the Atlanta that she grew up in and then move on to learning about how Gone With the Wind became probably the most recognizable story about the Civil War and reconstruction in American history all right let's go awesome awesome let's go inside this is the living room so one of two rooms in this pretty teeny tiny apartment Again Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh moved here shortly after they married actually July 4th of 1925 is when they moved in the room we're standing in you see a little bit of Margaret Mitchell's original items you also see some furniture that is from the same time period but what I love about this room is that you get to learn about Margaret Mitchell's family influences and her intellectual influences um she comes from a long line of people who grew up in Atlanta in the south all four of her grandparents who are pictured on the wall over there um were alive and participating in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy so both of her grandfathers fought for the Confederacy and both of her grandmothers of course were at home uh when the war was going on so Margaret Mitchell talks about growing up she would hear about history from her grandparents and she was hearing about a very specific version of History so she was hearing about it from folks who fought for the Confederacy and therefore were bringing Viewpoint to how they were talking about what the Civil War and reconstruction afterwards really meant so you see her family influences her intellectual influences and you can see where the history and G With the Wind really comes from can you talk about the typewriter the typewriter so this typewriter is actually the same make and model of her original typewriter the original typewriter is actually in the collections of the Atlanta fton County Public Library as so you can see it there but the table on which the typewriter is sitting is her original desk Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind SE sitting right in this room right in that corner at that table and chair uh she would sit down she would type out a chapter when she was done she' take that probably large stack of type Pages stuff them in an envelope and hide them somewhere in the apartment and it was through that way that eventually she ended up with a whole book so we don't think initially she was planning to publish the book we think it was something she was doing kind of for her own gratification she was already a writer she worked as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal in the 1920s so she had always pinned short stories from the time that she was a kid so she was already a writer uh but she wasn't yet a novelist and she was a reluctant novelist to say the least well that's exciting just to be in the in the room with the desk yeah it's really it's there's something about being in the room where it happened I think is what makes this exhibit particularly meaningful this is room two of the two bedroom apartment or the two room apartment where Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh lived in this room you get to learn about how the book actually turned from typed hidden away manuscript in various aspects or various places in this apartment to a full novel I me you also get to learn about the Atlanta in which Margaret Mitchell was writing Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900 she lived in Atlanta her whole life she grew up at the Apex of Jim Crow segregation if you think about when she was coming of age when she was a teenager and a young adult that is often the time period that historians site as the height of Jim Crow segregation specifically in Georgia and in Atlanta so she grew up in a place that had two atlantas she grew up on one side of what was called the color line but on the other side there was robust development happening with black colleges and universities what's often called black wal Street uh the sweet operan District of town really successful black businesses the other half of this room is learning about how the book went from typed manuscript to final 137 page Gone With the Wind and that happened through a series of somewhat unlikely circumstances so Matt Millan Publishers had an editor named Harold leam and Harold would go all around the country in the search of the hot new novel you know find uh the new writers undiscovered writers and he received a tip from a reporter friend who had worked with Margaret Mitchell and she was a reporter at the Atlanta Journal that there was this woman named Margaret Mitchell or Margaret Marsh who was you know writing this novel that was hidden a way that she wasn't really letting people read but that might be really interesting to him he ended up calling on Margaret Mitchell they talked and he convinced her uh to let him bring the manuscript back to McMillan to take a look at it he actually had to purchase a whole new suitcase to haul it back with him and if you think about this time period you could have just popped it in a PDF and sent an email so if you think about the final book was 1,37 pages I can't imagine how many typewritten pages he was trying to haul with and back and we actually do have the original suitcase that he purchased while in Atlanta for the express purpose of bringing back the manuscript that became gone with the win what's the general theme of this room this room takes you from how do we get from this book that was published in just under or just over a year from being discovered to being published how do we get from that to it being the cultural phenomenon that we know that Gone With the Wind is even still today so it didn't take long for it to be identified that this is a really compelling story that would translate really well to the Silver Screen and it was David o snik a very famous Hollywood producer who was the man to do it one thing I like to point out something I find interesting in this part of the exhibit is the fact that Gone With the Wind was extremely popular when it came out but it was not without some controversy when it came out even with the book but especially when it got picked up as the movie and got a lot more attention drawn to it as the movie um so in the corner over there you can see there's some correspondence that we have between David O selnik and Walter White who the head of the NAACP at that time and Walter White writes to selnik and tells him I'm paraphrasing here but basically tells him look within Gone With the Wind there are some problems with the way that black people are portrayed um it's not reflective of the history of slavery and reconstruction and perhaps you should look at ways that you can mitigate some of that in the film and you do see some changes that were made in the film from book to film that are pretty notable um but you also do see that there the stereotyping and things get reproduced in the film as well and that caused a lot of controversy around the casting and the casting story is really fascinating there was a nationwide search who was going to be Scarlet O'Hara basically everyone figured out that Clark Gable was going to be Rett Butler pretty quickly but Scarlet was the one that everyone was trying to think of who's it going to be of course we ended up with Vivian Lee uh but on the other side of that this was an incredible opportunity for black film actors to be in a major project that was going to be seen by millions of people um but there was tension there because there was discussion within the black community about the tension between having this opport this incredible opportunity for black actors to get greater recognition and the roles that they would be portraying and how they very much smooth over the uglier parts of slavery and that tension I think is very interesting of course uh Hattie McDaniel who played mam in the film goes on to incred success at this part of the exhibit um something very interesting I don't think a lot of people know or haven't thought about it this way on the other side of town about 3 and a half miles from where we're standing right now there was a professor at Atlanta University named web Deo obviously very famous intellectual just Titan of intellectual tradition he was also a sociologist um prolific writer published many books in his lifetime one of those books was called black reconstruction in America America which we have in the case right here this book was actually published in 1935 Gone With the Wind published in 1936 and the Reconstruction that you see presented in Black reconstruction In America which lays out a Viewpoint of reconstruction as a missed opportunity rather than some kind of unfair failure it shows how black people were able to gain civil and political rights for the first time in this country's history it shows how those rights were used it shows how institutions like public education public health organizations other things I think we take for granted today have their roots in the Reconstruction Era but it also shows the tragic missed opportunity that came when federal troops were um were taken back out of the South and white rule was restored and that and only when we when that happens is when we end up with Jim Crow segregation I think sometimes people think oh after the Civil War slavery ends Jim Crow segregation begins immediately it's actually not what happened we had a time period there uh where there was the opportunity for things to be different uh for there to be a true interracial democracy and that is the history that web Deo explores in Black reconstruction in America published in 1935 that is not the version of reconstruction history that is published in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind well how does it feel to be like the steward of all of this history I think Atlanta History Center has such a responsibility um not only do we have Margaret Mitchell house but we also have other significant artifacts of Civil War and reconstruction what historians would call historical memory uh the way that we look at the past and how we think about it it's exciting history and it's also history that I think is so resonant with folks all over the country and we're just thrilled to have the opportunity to be open again uh to be talking about that significant history and to be uh forming that storytelling opportunity [Music]