The reminders of Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell are all around Atlanta, including the author’s longtime home in Midtown.
Her lasting testament was one solitary novel, “Gone With the Wind,” a Civil War-era masterpiece which won the title of Most Distinguished Novel in 1936 and a Pulitzer Prize the following year.
Mitchell, who was born in 1900 and died in 1949, was shaped by much of what she learned in “The ’60s” — the 1860s. That’s what the old-timers of her day often told her about when she listened to their stories. Civil War veterans waxed on about a poetic South where the white man’s enchanted existence was seen as unstoppable.
When recalling her mother, Mitchell once said, “She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn’t have some weapon to meet the new world.”
From her older relatives who remembered the genuine, slaveholding Old South, this is what she said: “On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.”
As a literary superstar Mitchell was second to none in Atlanta. So it made quite a commotion when in August 1949, she died at Grady Hospital of injuries received when she was struck down by a speeding caron Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta.
The driver, a 29-year-old taxi driver, was charged with drunken driving, speeding and driving on the wrong side of the street.
Gov. Herman Talmadge ordered the flag over the State Capitol lowered to half-staff until after the funeral.
Crowds of people swelled to pay respects at a funeral service at Spring Hill, Atlanta funeral home. Today, she rests entombed at the historic Oakland Cemetery on the city’s east side.
Years later, it was disclosed that Mitchell secretly donated funds to educate young black men.
“We have in our archives, our collection, the bank books, the checks,” says college archivist Herman “Skip” Mason.
“Dr. Martin Luther King in his ‘I have a Dream’ speech talked about, ‘One day, I’d like to have a nation where the sons of former slaves will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood with the sons of former slave-owners,'” Atlanta historian Ira Joe Johnson was quoted as saying. “And I say, at Morehouse, twenty years before Dr. King gave that speech, Margaret Mitchell not only sat down at the table, she pulled out the check.”