“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 5): Should you boycott this historical novel, because of its slavery and racism? Perspective and history.

Perspective

Do you also boycott the one dollar bill, the quarter dollar coin, and anything named after George Washington, because he owned slaves during his presidency? Do you also boycott the Hebrew Bible and The New Testament, because neither Moses nor Jesus prohibited the institution of slavery?

History

How had the South originally gotten its slaves? Most slaves had been bought by white slavetraders from black African slaveowners (1).

There had been black slaveowners in South Carolina (2). 

There had been slaves in New York City and business deals between Northerners and slaveowners in the South (3).

1. Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” New York Times, April 23, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html

2. Larry Koger. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. University of South Carolina Press, 1985.

3. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (Editors). Slavery in New York. Published in Conjunction With the New-York Historical Society. New York, The New Press, 2005.