I know that Gone With The Wind is painfully racist in both the way it glorifies the Old South (the opening screen, for instance) and in the way all the black characters are portrayed, but it's still a masterpiece, damn it. Hattie McDaniel deserved that Oscar, by the way.
I own the blu-ray and when I watch it, I always bear in mind its historical context. It's very much a product of its time and the last gasp of a generation of people who still remembered the events it described. While the Antebellum South was a world that needed to be crushed and its end is a good thing for civilisation as a whole, its memory at that point in time is one that needs to be preserved both as a lesson for the future and because of historical value in and of itself.
Besides which it was, more than anything, the story of the Civil War through the eyes of an anti-hero. Scarlett is a selfish bitch who gets her just desserts in spite of everything she did, and in some cases, because of it. Through the course of the movie and the book, you see her squander every chance she has at happiness chasing an impossible dream that never existed, that never could exist. In many ways, Scarlett represents the remnants of the Confederacy as a whole - an entire nation trying to hold back the tide of history using their bare hands.
I always took what happened to Scarlett to mean that the dream of the Antebellum South that an entire generation pined for was nothing but an illusion that would inevitably crumble, just as the dashing figure of Ashley Wilkes was an illusion to Scarlett.
Would the movie had been better with stronger black characters? I say no (though I do think McDaniel's character was perfect). The story was never about them, really, but their presence does help to contextualise who the main characters are. It sucks, but there's really no place for empowered black characters in Gone With The Wind.
A Lincoln biopic, on the other hand, would be a great opportunity to tell stories about strong black characters.
