Trying to shield students from any important part of history is a crime within itself. Hannibal, Missouri is a prime example of this type of crime. Every year they have a citywide celebration of Mark Twain, but they do not celebrate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson nor do they teach it in their schools. Best stated by Shelly Fisher Fishkin, the theater company in Hannibal “was upholding a long American tradition of making slavery and its legacy and blacks themselves invisible”(Zwick, Jim. “Should Huckleberry Finn Be Banned?”). This just shows how foolish many parts of America can be; they embrace him and call him a genius in one aspect, but they conveniently don’t seem to notice his genius in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because they are too distracted by the language and actions of Huckleberry Finn himself. Just because a book has some offensive content is not enough of a reason to ban a book, the general value of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn greatly overshadows any offensive language it may contain. It shows how the American public thought back then, their morals, and their way of life. It was simply they way they were brought up. In Chapter 32 of Huckleberry Finn Aunt Sally asks if anyone was hurt in a steamboat accident, Huck replies, "No'm. Killed a nigger”(Twain 167). The subject is then closed because no “people” were harmed, and in their minds, nobody was. That is something that cannot be expressed in a textbook or a teacher with the same degree of authenticity. The book immerses the student in a time where slavery was accepted. Teachers taught it, pastors preached it, mayors practiced it, and children saw absolutely nothing wrong with it because that is how they had been brought up. Huckleberry, however, was not raised “proper” and so had an almost completely clean head about the subject “The Widow Douglas, she ...
