Huckleberry Finn and the N-Word Debate From CBSs 60 Minutes

Should a publisher replace the N-word with "slave" in Mark Twain's classic novel?

This story was first published March 20, 2011. It was updated on June 12, 2011.

From the moment it was published in 1885, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn caused controversy. It challenged authority, poked fun at religion and was accused of leading children astray. What's surprising is that 125 years later, Huckleberry Finn is still making news.

Today there are school districts in America that ban this American classic for one reason - one word: "nigger," a word so offensive it's usually called the "N-word."

As we first reported in March, a publishing company in Alabama says that schools don't have to change their reading list because they changed Huckleberry Finn. Their newly released edition removes the N-word and replaces it with "slave." It's a bold move for what is considered one of the greatest works in American literature.

Is it ever okay to say it?An honest discussion about a racial slur with Byron Pitts, a reporter who speaks from experience.

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a classic set before the Civil War. The story is told by Huck, a white boy escaping an abusive father, and about his adventures with a black man named Jim, escaping slavery.

Huckleberry Finn is set along the Mississippi River. In it, Twain used the N-word 219 times. To some people, the word gets in the way of the story's powerful message against slavery; to others, Twain is simply capturing the way people talked back then.

"Are you censoring Twain?" correspondent Byron Pitts asked Randall Williams, co-owner and editor of NewSouth Books, publishers of the sanitized edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that replaces the N-word with the word "slave."

"We certainly are accused of censoring Twain," Williams replied.

It's aimed at schools that already ban the book, though no one knows how many have. Williams says they are not trying replace Twain's original, N-word included.

"If you can have the discussion and you're comfortable havin' the discussion, have it. Have it with it in there. But if you're not comfortable with that, then here's an alternative for you to use. And I would argue to you that it's still powerful," Williams said.

The new edition drew powerful reactions from Twain scholars, the press and ordinary readers - and it's worth noting most of the articles don't spell out the word, either.

"What's it say that people have been so passionate about it?" Pitts asked.

"I think it says that race continues to be a volatile and divisive subject," Williams said.

In this passage, Huck says the word three times in two sentences: "Jim was monstrous proud about it and he got so he couldn't hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers come miles to hear Jim tell about it and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country."

"What do you think of Huckleberry Finn?" Pitts asked author David Bradley, who teaches at the University of Oregon

"It's a great book. It's one of the greatest books in American literature," Bradley replied.

He says the key to understanding Huckleberry Finn is through Twain's use of language, as the friendship between Huck and Jim unfolds.

"When Huck comes back to that raft, he says, 'They're after us.' He doesn't say, 'They're after you.' He says, 'They're after us.' And that's the moment when it becomes about the American dilemma, it becomes about, 'Are we gonna get along?'" Bradley said.

School districts struggling to teach Huckleberry Finn have called in Bradley. He believes strongly in teaching Twain's original text.

"One of the first things I do is I make everybody say it out loud about six or seven times," Bradley said.

"The N-word?" Pitts asked.

"Yeah, 'nigger.' Get over it," Bradley replied, laughing. "You know. Now let's talk about the

PBS- Huck Finn Culture Shock

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."-Mark Twain, Introductory Note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Ernest Hemingway declared that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." T. S. Eliot called it a "masterpiece." Now an accepted part of the American literary canon, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is required reading in over 70 percent of American high schools and is among the most taught works of American literature.

Yet Huck Finn has been in trouble almost continuously since the day it was first published in America in 1885. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts immediately banned it as "the veriest trash, suitable only for the slums." A newspaper account described the library's objections to the novel:

It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality; it is couched in the language of a rough dialect, and all through its pages there is a systemic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions. It is also very irreverent. . . . The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people.-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 17, 1885

The Brooklyn Public Library followed suit in 1905, removing it from the children's room because Huck was a liar who "not only itched, but scratched," was dirty, used terrible grammar, and "said 'sweat' when he should have said 'perspiration.'" By 1907 libraries in Denver, Omaha, and Worcester (Massachusetts) had removed the book because Huck and Tom were "bad" role models. During the 1930s many libraries purchased expurgated or "junior" versions of the novel, which omitted sections and simplified the language.

Over the years the novel has been declared "unfit for children" on a number of counts, but the indictment that has proven most persistent began in 1957, when the NAACP charged that Huck Finn contained "racial slurs" and "belittling racial designations." Since then, the book has been called "racist" for both the pervasive use of the word "nigger" and a portrayal of blacks that some people consider stereotypical and demeaning. It has been removed from reading lists in schools ranging from Texas to Pennsylvania (including, ironically, the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax, Virginia). Public libraries also continue to deal with requests that the book be removed, although the focus of the controversy has shifted to the classroom.

According to the People for the American Way, the most frequently challenged books in 1995-1996 were the following (listed here in alphabetical order by title). Many of these titles, including Huck Finn, also appear on the list for 1982-1992.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark TwainBridge to Terabithia by Katherine PatersonThe Catcher in the Rye by J. D. SalingerThe Chocolate War by Robert CormierThe Color Purple by Alice WalkerA Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton PeckThe Giver by Lois LowryGo Ask Alice by AnonymousI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya AngelouMy Brother Sam Is Dead by Christopher and James Lincoln CollierNative Son by Richard WrightOf Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

One of the most outspoken opponents of Huck Finn in the 1980s was John Wallace, then a school administrator, who went so far as to rewrite the novel without the word "nigger." He spoke for many of the book's critics when he wrote, in a 1982 Washington Post editorial,

"The reading aloud of Huck Finn in our classrooms is humiliating and insulting to black students. It contributes to their feelings of low self-esteem and to the white student's disrespect for black people. . . . For the past forty years, black families have trekked to schools in numerous districts throughout the country to say, 'This book is not good for our children' only to be turned away by insensitive and often unwittingly racist teachers and administrators who respond, 'This book is a classic.'"

Margo Allen, in an article titled "Huck Finn: Two Generations of Pain" (Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, 15, 1984), described her negative experiences with the book: "I need not tell you that I hated the book! Yet, while we read it, I pretended that it didn't bother me. I hid, from my teacher and my classmates, the tension, discomfort and hurt I would feel every time I heard that word or watched the class laugh at Jim. . . ."

Champions of the novel reply that it is a satire, a scathing attack on the hypocrisy and prejudice of a society that pretends to honor virtue while condoning slavery. Although state NAACP organizations have supported various protests against the book, the NAACP national headquarters' current position paper states:

You don't ban Mark Twain-you explain Mark Twain! To study an idea is not necessarily to endorse the idea. Mark Twain's satirical novel, Huckleberry Finn, accurately portrays a time in history-the nineteenth century-and one of its evils, slavery.

Not only is it not racist, says scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, it is "the greatest anti-racist novel by an American writer." Through the story of a friendship between a white boy and a runaway slave who search for freedom together on a raft down the Mississippi River, Twain explores friendship, loyalty, morality, freedom, race, and America itself. With a "sound heart" triumphing over a "deformed conscience," Huck decides he'll "go to hell" rather than give his friend Jim up to slavery. As writer David Bradley says, "Huckleberry Finn should be taught because it is a seminal and central text in White American Literature. Huckleberry Finn should be taught because it is a seminal and central text in Black American Literature. Huckleberry Finn must be taught because it is a specific point of intersection between these two American Literatures."

Questions to Ponder:

1. What are the arguments for and against teaching Huck Finn?

2. Are you at all offended when you read the text? Explain.

3. If individuals in our district moved to either ban or change the text of Huckleberry Finn, how would you respond?

4. If our district were to replace the novel with something of similar quality, what would you suggest? (need not know a title, genre will do as well). Why?