I should have explained my citations: Fishkin. MT Anthology 2010. Morrison. Intro to the OUP ed of HF 1996 Morrison. Playing in the Dark. 1992. This last book is must reading for anyone interested in HF. Kevin @ Mac Donnell Rare Books 9307 Glenlake Drive Austin TX 78730 512-345-4139 Member: ABAA, ILAB ************************* You may browse our books at: www.macdonnellrarebooks.com -----Original Message----- From: Kevin Mac Donnell Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2018 10:56 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: 'Hurtful' Harper Lee and Mark Twain dropped from Minnesota curriculum Toni Morrison said something very similar, which I quote in an essay I wrote on reader responses to HF for Kent Rasmussen's recently published HF Critical Insights. I reviewed responses from 19th, 20th, and 21st century readers, breaking it all down by readership and looking at what little boys had to say versus little girls, academics, general readers, book reviewers, fellow authors, etc. I've copied and pasted in the relevant section of my essay below and hope it survives intact. There are quite a few quotation marks that will trigger a lot of pesky coding: Twentieth Century African American Readers Black writers’ reactions to the story have been just as varied. Ralph Ellison echoed Booker T. Washington in 1953, when he wrote that Mark Twain “does not idealize the slave, Jim. Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and superstition, with his good traits and his bad†(Fishkin 259). In 1982 Ellison still saw Huckleberry Finn as a “fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal . . . in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white . . . combine to tell us of transcendent truth and possibility such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft†(Fishkin 6). Neither Washington nor Ellison discusses the repeated presence of the word “nigger†in the text. Not so with humorist and social activist Dick Gregory, who embraced the word when he used it for the title of his autobiography in 1964. Says Gregory, “Titling my book Nigger meant I was taking it back from white folks. Mark Twain threw it up in the air and I grabbed it†(Fishkin 448). Fairfax County school administrator John H. Wallace generated widespread media attention when he produced a heavily sanitized edition of Huckleberry Finn in 1983 that removed the words “nigger†and “hell†from the text, as well as entire passages, rendering parts of the story absurd. Although he acknowledged Mark Twain’s intended satire, he still saw the book as damaging to young black readers. Law professor Sharon E. Rush, provoked by the pain her young daughter felt when forced to read the book as part of her school curriculum, wrote Huck Finn’s “Hidden†Lessons (2006), thoughtfully explaining why she felt the book was racist and advocating that it be removed from required curricula and taught instead as an “anticanonical text in American literature†that demonstrates the “limits of whites’ goodwill toward blacks and other people of color†(Rush 149). Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s reaction to her first reading of Huckleberry Finn was similar to that of Sharon Rush’s daughter, but she has come to view the removal of the book from schools as a “purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children†(Fishkin 409). She does not dismiss the evasion chapters or protest the use of the word “nigger,†and focuses instead on the relationship of Huck and Jim, and notions of fatherhood and childhood. She also suggests that the book is “classic literature†whose “argument at the core†cannot be dismissed (Morrison Introduction xxxi-xli). What is that core? She wisely observes that if we supplement our reading of Huckleberry Finn, expand it—release it from its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness—to incorporate its contestatory, combative critique of antebellum America, it seems to be another, fuller novel. It becomes a more beautifully complicated work that sheds much light on some of the problems it has accumulated through traditional readings too shy to linger over the implications of the Africanist presence at its center (Morrison 54). Kevin @ Mac Donnell Rare Books 9307 Glenlake Drive Austin TX 78730 512-345-4139 Member: ABAA, ILAB ************************* You may browse our books at: www.macdonnellrarebooks.com -----Original Message----- From: Barbara Schmidt Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 8:50 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: 'Hurtful' Harper Lee and Mark Twain dropped from Minnesota curriculum Every time I read about one of these "banning" controversies, I am reminded of Jocelyn Chadwick's excellent essay in _Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ (Salem Press, 2017). Chadwick decries such efforts which are undertaken for "children who somehow require the aid of benevolent white and black critics to think and reflect for them." Chadwick further states, "Today's students are proving more than capable of having these hard conversations; indeed, they flourish in them because they want to think and break apart and analyze and understand." A highly recommended essay from an outstanding Mark Twain scholar for any school board wrestling with such issues. Barb