Hattie McDaniel took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1940 for her performance in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. It's true that, as a black person, he couldn't sit next to Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, who were shining in the main roles, at the award ceremony, which awarded this film another nine Oscar statuettes. Due to segregation laws, he was only given a table at the back of the room.

Margaret Mitchell's hugely successful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title, published in 1936 - sold more than 30 million copies, translated into 27 languages, including Hungarian by Lola Kosáryné Réz in 1937 - as well as its film adaptation, still play a particularly important role plays in the American cultural-national self-definition: showing the possibilities of a self-conscious and independent woman asserting herself against the strongly patriarchal, sexist social expectations of the time that put women within limits in the environment of the Civil War.

However, according to the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement, the film based on one of the greatest romance novels of all time portrays blacks without exception as servile, stupid, and lazy, while it has a positive attitude towards slavery. In 2020, following the protests, the film classic therefore disappeared from the offer of film channels for a while, and was soon reinstated accompanied by two short explanatory videos: placing the work of art in a film and contemporary historical context.

That much is certain, the novel about the stormy and passionate life of Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of a rich planter, in the midst of the struggle between the North and the South, is a contemporary and at the same time a valuable document of America's cultural and political history, which generates debates - and, not to mention, an engaging literary read to this day .