Censoring Huckleberry Finn :: Essays Papers

Censoring Huckleberry Finn Fellow staff, teachers and students, as we all know high school is a time to grow, find yourself and experience different personalities of different people. It is also meant to help you get ready for a world where dealing with different people and situations comes quickly. If you condone certain parts of this real world then you will not be prepared to face the problems and dilemmas of life. Censoring Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a prime example of shutting out the real world. It should be used as a way to portray life in the south during the Civil Rights Movement. To show how wrong we used to live our lives and how much better our lives are today. Huckleberry Finn is a story about a runaway slave trying to live free in the south. The controversy about the book deals with the common use of the word â€Å"nigger† and the character Jim as a stereotypical runaway slave. People believe that it is a perfect example of racism in literature and should not be allowed to be read. Unfortunately, society today is trying to ignore our past and harsh times. In Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain wrote this novel they celebrate Tom Sawyer Days. This is when the whole town celebrates the works of Mark Twain. The sad thing is, Huckleberry Finn is not given its greatest gratitude even in its hometown. They try too ignore it, as if the city â€Å"is upholding a long American tradition of making slavery and its legacy and blacks themselves invisible† (Zwick 2). As they say, History repeats itself and if we are not prepared for it then how can we make things better? Reading Huckleberry Finn today would be just like reading history books. History books teach about slavery and the Civil Rights Movements and we are not pulling them off our high school curriculum. â€Å"Mark Twain told America, ‘This is how you are, like it or not†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (Zwick 2). Many people do not want to face the reality that things said in Huckleberry Finn really or actually happened.