oupacademic:On this day, 75 years ago in 1939, Gone With The Wind premiered in Atlanta, Georgia.The

oupacademic:On this day, 75 years ago in 1939, Gone With The Wind premiered in Atlanta, Georgia.The entirety of the black cast — including Hattie McDaniel, the unforgettable and Oscar-winning Mammy — was missing from attendance.MGM did little to fight the Jim Crow laws. It’s said that Clark Gable threatened to drop the premiere unless the full cast could attend, but the studio’s pressure was too great—making the event political might have negatively affected reviews and media coverage.Hattie McDaniel had won some small battles with director David O. Selznick during the filming (replacing some of the most egregious racial slurs in the script, for example), but the role itself still reinforced common stereotypes — a point that the NAACP had spoken out against. The woman who hoped to “always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry” would spend the rest of her career defending herself.Image credit: “McDaniel, Hattie.” African American National Biography, edited by Ed. Henry Louis Gates., edited by, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Oxford African American Studies Center. -- source link

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