Care to elaborate Sam?
It is certainly true that Margaret Mitchell was an ardent fan of Thomas Dixon's and she wrote to him in August 1536 to tell him so: "I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much. For many years I have had you on my conscience, and I suppose I might as well confess it now." Equally, the racial stereotyping exhibited in Gone With the Wind is arguably similar to that of Dixon's works.
True, but in the book, she frequently condemns the Klan.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that Margaret Mitchell praised the Ku Klux Klan - I don't know enough on the matter to suggest that and I would imagine if she had done then the film would have been met with even more protests than it was - but that the representation of African-Americans in it were racially stereotypical and influenced by the works of white supremacists. I've also come across articles which suggest that Mitchell's depiction of Reconstruction is based upon Dixon's.
The representations of black slaves within Mitchell's book, quite frankly, adhere to representations of black slaves common throughout American literature at that time, and certainly the movie version adheres to the representation of blacks in movies at that time. Whether all those authors were white supremacists or not is your own opinion.
The reason why I said "not really" in my response to you is that while the Mitchell-to-Dixon letter shows influence on Mitchell by Dixon, that influence is basically found only within the last third of the book, and her admiration of Dixon (which was quite strong) definitely did not impact or influence the basic "feminist" thrust of the novel, or quite frankly, the first two-thirds of the novel (the before Reconstruction part), with the exception of what I mentioned above, which was quite common in writers of that time (heck, you see it in Faulkner too, to a much lesser extent).
The part of the book (it's in the movie too) you're undoubtedly referencing is where Scarlett drives through Shantytown, housed by all the poor black men, who attack her. She is only saved, as I recall, by her former slave. Then, the men want to get together and take it out on the blacks who attacked her, which of course, sounds quite similar to the infamous part of the Dixon novel.
