Mark Twain then put the article in his pile of posthumous manuscripts, fearing the reactions of Southerners.
As a newspaper reporter during the Civil War, Twain often wrote about the brutality against the Chinese population by the police. In 1865, he startled Northerners and abolitionists when he walked down Montgomery Street (in San Fransisco) arm-in-arm with the editor of the newly established African-American newspaper. (Titta).
The most controversial, yet influential, piece of evidence proving Twain to be, or not be, a racist, is his novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." For over thirty years, critics have called attention to the "racial epithets in Huckleberry Finn as an example of the inherent racism of the author." (Smith) In particular, African-Americans have objected to the book and many school districts have either banned the book, or made alternate literary selections available for any objecting student. .
Shortly after its publication, the book was banned from the Concord Public Library by a committee that found if "more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people. Twain's use of dialect and first person narration from an unschooled child's perspective were shocking to the cultural elite of the time, but the book transformed American literature." (Huckleberry Finn Debated).
3.
In his 1935 book, The Green Hills of Africa, Ernest.
Hemingway wrote that "all modern American literature.
comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry.
Finn. All American writing comes from that. There was.
nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.".
(Huckleberry Finn Debated).
A careful examination of Huckleberry Finn proves that the book is not racist. After all, on of the main theme of the book is a white boy helping, and befriending, a runaway slave--hardly a racist theme. The novel is set in the South. Blacks are slaves and their status is lower than that of a white person, and Huck grows up debating that reality.