The US Department of Education is taking very seriously a complaint against Tempe (Arizona) high schools for teaching "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." I fear that the feds might ban this novel from all public schools. I first learned about this case in late April, when pickets spent a week demonstrating against the Tempe Union High School District. One sign said, "Mark Twain was racist." Among the demonstrators was the head of the Arizona NAACP. (See the Arizona Republic, April 23, 1996, page B1.) The picketers then filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. A team from the Office studied the complaint and recommended an investigation, which is being carried out by Ramon Villarreal and David Dunbar. (See the Arizona Republic, July 3, 1996, Community Section, page 4.) To my mind, the charge is unfair. Mark Twain was remarkable because although he was a son of slave owners he realized that slavery was wrong. Turning his back on much of what he had learned as a boy in Missouri, he vocally condemned racial injustice in America and the European colonies in Africa. He also donated money for African American education. He funded scholarships at Lincoln University. He supported Warner Thornton McGuinn through Yale Law School. He financed study in Paris for artist Charles Ethan Porter. In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" he dramatized his own moral struggle. It took Mark Twain years to figure out that slavery was wrong, but he has Huck figure it out in a raft trip of a couple weeks. Mark Twain had to talk to many whites and blacks away from Missouri to figure out that slavery was wrong, but he has Huck learn it from Jim on the raft. Also, Huck is himself a runaway who is seeing Missouri society from a new perspective. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Educators took this statement seriously during the 1940s and '50s, and I believe that their work helped prepare America for the Civil Rights Movement. Even when I began eleventh grade in 1966 in Wisconsin, this is how American literature was still taught. The irony is that, if Mark Twain had not written "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," there might not be an Office of Civil Rights with the power to ban this novel. The Tempe Union High School District has consulted with experts here at Arizona State University to try to understand what has gone wrong. And they have met with the protesters to try to reach a compromise. But the anti-Twain forces seem determined to totally remove "Huckleberry Finn" from the schools. Besides the two articles I mentioned above, there were related pieces on January 29 and May 27. I don't know their page numbers because I found them on Arizona Newspapers On-Line, which does not give page numbers. Mark Midbon