Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History

3 Saving “The Dump”: Race and the Restoration of the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta

69 3 Saving “The Dump” Race and the Restoration of the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta Kathleen Clark On the morning of May 16, 1997, a sizable crowd gathered expectantly outside a handsome three-story Victorian house on Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta. They had come to celebrate the opening of the Margaret Mitchell House—the onetime apartment building where Margaret Mitchell had lived with her husband, John Marsh, at the time she wrote Gone with the Wind. It was an impressive assemblage that included, among others , Georgia governor Zell Miller, Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell, the author Tom Wolfe, and Mitchell descendants who stood, shivering in the morning breeze, as they waited for the official unveiling. One after another, speakers praised Mitchell’s accomplishments, including her various philanthropic endeavors, and Wolfe proclaimed Gone with the Wind “one of the great tours de force in literary history.”1 It was a day that many in Atlanta had doubted would ever come to pass. Indeed, the long effort to memorialize Mitchell through the restoration of “the dump,” as Mitchell teasingly referred to the tiny (six hundred square feet), cramped, and dark two-room apartment where she and Marsh resided during the early years of marriage, was a vexing and obstacle-ridden struggle. Perhaps most obvious was the problem of race—Atlanta was a majority-black city by the late twentieth century, and Mitchell’s novel was laden with deeply racist characterizations. African American playwright Pearl Cleague voiced a sentiment shared by many in the local black community when she reflected on a fire that had gutted the nearly-renovated house the year before: “I live in Southwest Atlanta [a predominantly African 70 Race and the Restoration of the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta American neighborhood]. Nobody in my neighborhood cared that that house burned down, not a single soul. Everyone found it humorous.”2 Indeed , opening-day speakers’ pointed emphasis on Mitchell’s philanthropy, which included secretly sponsoring several dozen black medical students in the 1940s, clearly aimed to answer critics like Cleague and craft an image of the author that would be more palatable to a post-civil-rights audience. But racial controversy was not the only challenge faced by the small but determined group of preservationists who had labored for more than a decade to “save the dump.” Atlanta, after all, is hardly known for its reverence for things past, and one of the many ironies of the Margaret Mitchell House is that it stands surrounded by sparkling high-rise structures—a mix of hotels, modern apartment buildings, and corporate offices—that serve as living monuments to the city’s penchant for ridding itself of the old to make way for the new. Indeed, more than any other place in the region, Atlanta has long embraced the “New South” spirit defined by one of its most famous residents and committed boosters, Henry Grady: “The New South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling Figure 3.1. View of Crescent Apartments (later renovated as the Margaret Mitchell House) in the midtown area of Atlanta, 1988. (Courtesy Atlanta History Center.) Kathleen Clark 71 with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity.” While Grady’s proclamation contained a strong dose of wishful thinking when first issued in 1886, one hundred years later—as the first tentative efforts to establish a Mitchell memorial got under way—his words aptly described the rapid development of the city under a succession of pro-business mayoral administrations . With one older building after another falling to wrecking balls and bulldozers, it seemed extremely unlikely that a rat-infested and dilapidated apartment building, especially one so closely associated with a history of racism that is anathema to the self-image of the “city too busy to hate,” would escape a similar fate. Mayor Andrew Young, who was weeks away from signing papers to make way for the apartments’ demolition in 1987, was openly skeptical of their value, even as many in the tourist industry decried the city’s failure to offer significant attractions relating to Mitchell or Gone with the Wind. The mayor dismissed the notion that the dilapidated “House” where Mitchell and Marsh had lived for just seven years could have much appeal—it was hardly Tara, after all—and...