Both book and the movie were written and produced at the time the KKK was fading but the sentiment was still the same.
Margaret Mitchell was from families that had been slave owners and:
Margaret learned the gritty details of specific battles from these visits with aging Confederate soldiers. But she didn't learn that the South had actually lost the war until she was 10 years of age: "I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell#Girlhood_on_Jackson_HillMitchell read the books of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and in 1916, when the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, was showing in Atlanta, she dramatized Dixon's The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907).[49][50][51][52] As both playwright and actress, she took the role of Steve Hoyle.[43]:14–15 For the production, she made a Ku Klux Klan costume from a white crepe dress and wore a boy's wig.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell#School_life(Dixon wrote the book The Birth of a Nation and got it made into the movie of the same name -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dixon_Jr.#Dixon_as_novelist)
As for the movie:
Gone with the Wind has been criticized as having perpetuated Civil War myths and black stereotypes.[96] David Reynolds wrote that "The white women are elegant, their menfolk noble or at least dashing. And, in the background, the black slaves are mostly dutiful and content, clearly incapable of an independent existence." Reynolds likened Gone with the Wind to The Birth of a Nation and other re-imaginings of the South during the era of segregation, in which white Southerners are portrayed as defending traditional values, and the issue of slavery is largely ignored.[60] The film has been described as a "regression" that promotes both the myth of the black rapist and the honorable and defensive role of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction,[97] and as a "social propaganda" film offering a "white supremacist" view of the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)#Racial_criticism
I've only seen the movie all the way through once, when my parents took us to a showing at the local drive in theater. Truthfully, I may not have stayed awake for the whole thing. I've caught pieces of it when it was shown on TV and immensely enjoyed satires of it such as the Carol Burnett scene with the drapes.
The themes of racism, glorification of the "Southern Way of Life" before the Civil War, and the horrendous portrayal of blacks always put me off - and the ridiculous way women were portrayed, did too.
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