LOS ANGELES • The Hollywood classic Gone With The Wind, which was pulled from the American streaming platform HBO Max following the Black Lives Matter protests, will be returning with an introduction by black scholar Jacqueline Stewart.

The 1939 movie has been widely criticised for romanticising slavery, and the introduction by Stewart aims to explain the historical context of the film and how the racist prejudices against blacks were commonplace in American society at the time, according to USA Today.

"Right now, people are turning to movies for racial re-education, and the top-selling books on Amazon are about anti-racism and racial inequality," Stewart wrote in an op-ed for CNN on Saturday.

"If people are really doing their homework, we may be poised to have our most informed, honest and productive national conversations yet about black lives on screen and off."

Stewart, the host of Silent Sunday Nights on pay-TV network Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, did not specify when the movie will be returning on HBO Max.

An HBO statement, which followed the pulling of the movie from its platform on Wednesday, said: "Gone With The Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible."

The streaming service promised the movie would "return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created", the statement continued.

The movie is based on a book of the same name by Margaret Mitchell and is centred around the romance between Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, and Rhett Butler, a gambler who joins the Confederacy.