Institutional Advancement * Division of Communications * 830 Westview Drive, S.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30314

Morehouse College gets $1.5 million gift
in the name of Pulitzer Prize winning author Margaret Mitchell

Atlanta, March 18, 2002-The legacy left by an unlikely alliance between Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, sixth president of Morehouse College and Margaret Mitchell, author of the legendary novel "Gone With the Wind," continues to live on.

On Monday, March 18, 2002, Mitchell’s nephew, Eugene Mitchell, will present the College with a $1.5 million dollar gift.

The money will be used to endow the dean’s chair for the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. The chair will be named for Margaret Mitchell and will celebrate her commitment to literature, scholarship and humanity.

For more than a decade, during the racially charged 1940’s, Dr. Mays and Margaret Mitchell corresponded through letters. Those letters led to dozens of scholarships for Morehouse College students, personally paid for by Mitchell. Later, Mitchell would give Dr. Mays more money, this time to aid in the education of young men at Morehouse wanting to pursue careers in the fields of medicine and dentistry.

Now, more than 60 years later, the legacy that began with letters continues to benefit educational advancement at Morehouse College.

What: $1.5 million gift presented to Morehouse College
When: Monday, March 18, 2002, 2:00pm
Where: Davidson House, Morehouse College Campus
Who: Eugene Mitchell, nephew of author Margaret Mitchell

Ranked the number one college in the nation for educating African American students by Black Enterprise magazine, Morehouse College is the nation's largest liberal arts college for men. Founded in 1867, the College enrolls approximately 3,000 students and confers bachelor's degrees on more black men than any other institution in the world. In addition to offering 36 majors in the humanities, natural and social sciences, Morehouse offers a number of programs and activities to enhance its challenging liberal arts curriculum through the Leadership Center at Morehouse College, Morehouse Research Institute, and Andrew Young Center for International Affairs.

Prominent alumni include Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize laureate and civil rights leader; Dr. David Satcher, U.S. Surgeon General; Sheldon "Spike" Lee, filmmaker and president of 40 Acres & A Mule Productions; Maynard H. Jackson, president of Jackson Securities and the first African-American mayor of Atlanta; and Nima A. Warfield, the first African-American Rhodes Scholar from an historically black college or university.

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