Censorship In Huck Finn

Ever since the initial publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, the book has faced controversy for a plethora of reasons. Initially facing censorship in several public libraries for its crude and coarse language, it now faces allegations of racism from the many critics. Once considered a staple of the high school classroom, many parents have called for its removal from the curricula of dozens of school districts for its “racist content” and thusly holds a place as one of the most challenged books in the United States. Proponents of the novel hold the opinion that it is a vital part of a student’s education and find few issues with the text. The most cited disparity with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is …show more content…
Carl Wieck even goes so far as to suggest that Jim is one of the book’s most sincere characters. He is smart, kind, dedicated, and an overall good person. His actions show that he truly cares for Huck and his own family (Wieck 69). Furthermore, despite the fact Twain gives Jim an over accentuated dialect indicative of minstrel shows, he does bestow upon him a sense of humanity unparalleled by any other character in the book. His compassion is so large that he gives up his freedom to save a dying white boy that used him as a game (Nichols 212). Twain’s detractors will still claim that this is not enough; they say that Twain still makes Jim seem dumb and ignorant to the world. Well, they would be right. Jim is dumb and ignorant because he was a slave. This is not saying that all black people are stupid and uneducated, Twain adds a black professor into Pap’s drunken rant, this is just acknowledging the fact that slaves were not schooled and were kept ignorant to the world by their masters (Barksdale 50). Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua postulates that Jim is actually fairly intelligent. While he may not be conventionally intelligent, Jim was able to figure out that Huck was his ticket to freedom (Chadwick-Joshua