Huck Finn Book Trial Opponents of the book are correct to say that, the word nigger is used

219 times in the book. However, how do the opponents reconcile this? In The case of MONTEIRO v. THE TEMPE UNION HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT (1998)- Words can hurt, particularly racist epithets, Stephen Reinhardt wrote, but a necessary component of any education is learning to think critically about offensive ideas. Without this ability, one can do little to respond to them. Part of learning to think critically about offensive speech is to understand the context in which it is used. In a 3-0 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate a black womans lawsuit seeking to remove the Mark Twain classic and a William Faulkner story from the required-reading list at her daughters Arizona high school. The court acknowledged that words can wound, but said a book approved by school officials for its educational value does not violate federal civil rights laws. The grammar sucks. How do you reconcile this? It gives us a great insight into the vernacular of the American south at the time. Its something you cant read about in a textbook. Frederick Douglas never wrote in the vernacular. Banning books sucks. Banning books in general is bad enough! Where they burn books, they will also burn people.- Heinrich Heine (German romantic poet) The Nazis burned books, then they burned people. According to the Werther EffectHow do you reconcile this? Lets pretend we actually believe in the Werther Effect. Wouldnt we want our kids to act like righteous Huck?? Isnt this like the righteous gentiles during the holocaust? The friendship that forms between Jim and Huck you cant just find in a textbook It was a close place. I took . . . up [the letter I'd written to Miss Watson], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: All right then, I'll go to helland tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. True friendship is shown here, a complete rarity for those times. The books use of satire of various revered institutions is also uncommon for its time and should be looked on as a positive aspect that you cannot gain from simply reading a textbook. Sherburn says to the mob: The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from

their officers. But a mob without any Man at the head of it is Beneath pitifulness. It is obvious that he is satirizing the Klu Klux Klan here. Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)- Leslie Fielder His 1948 essay, Come Back to the Raft Agin, Huck Honey! argued that a recurrent theme in American literature was an unspoken or implied homoerotic relationship between men, and famously used Mark Twain's iconic fictional creations, Huckleberry Finn and his African American companion Jim, as examples. His book emphasized that males paired in these wilderness adventures tend to be of different races, and that their relationships include issues of masculinity and touch on intimacy, sensuality, and suppressed sexuality between men. In the case of Board of Education v. Pico (1982) the United States Supreme Court held that the First Amendment limits the power of local school boards to remove library books from junior high schools and high schools. Justice Blackmun, concurring, concluded that a proper balance between the limited constitutional restriction imposed on school officials by the First Amendment and the broad state authority to regulate education, would be struck by holding that school officials may not remove books from school libraries for the purpose of restricting access to the political ideas or social perspectives discussed in the books, when that action is motivated simply by the officials disapproval of the ideas involved. I. Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion, and Petition Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Schenck v. United States (1919)- Clear and present danger: doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States to determine under what circumstances limits can be placed on First Amendment freedoms of speech, press or assembly. What clear and present danger is presented in people reading this book Whitney v. California (1927)- Held that speech that merely advocated violence could be made illegal.

Twain's satirical observations concerning human folly and social injustice, during his lifetime, led to widespread criticism of his works as vulgar and improper. Throughout the book Huck participates in helping in conning people out of their money, lying to just about everybody he comes in contact with, and other activities which appear to be okay according to Twain. It seems that Mark Twain made everything that was bad seem ok and everything that promoted good was bad or just showed people's ignorance. Miss Watson tells Huck that if he doesn't change his ways then he won't go to heaven. Huck has come to believe that Miss Watson will be in heaven so he decides that he "couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it." Other times in the novel when people are at religious gatherings they all give money to people who get up and tell about their experiences. The people aren't smart enough to realize they are being conned out of their money so Twain puts the blame on religious belief rather than the ignorance of the individual. Furthermore, there is a feud between the Grangerford and the Shepherdson familys; they decide that they will not kill each other on Sunday because that is the holy day and because they are all loving brothers. However, Twain deliberately lets them fight to the death and murder each other in cold blood. Is this what teachers should provide students to educate them in the correct manner?

They will offer a series of bogus arguments that we will easily refute. We stand before u as the defenders of the cornerstone of democracy namely the 1st amendment and our commitment to the free exchange of ideas. Although this is a private school, there are 2 flags outside our school. Our Mission statement embraces the spirit of a publics school commitment to diversity, equality, acceptance and a broad education. And lastly and most imptly as jews we know how dangerous cencership is. What was the 1st thing Hitler did? He burned books. Do we really want to embrace that kind of cencership.

If W.E.B. Du Bois were right that the problem of the twentieth century is racism, one would never know it from the average secondary-school syllabus, which often avoids issues of race almost completely. However, Huck Finn can slip into the American literature classroom as a "classic," only to engulf students in heated debates about prejudice and racism, conformity, autonomy, authority, slavery and freedom. It is a book that puts on the table the very questions the culture so often tries to bury, a book that opens out into the complex history that shaped it; the history of the ante-bellum era in which the story is set, and the history of the post-war period in which the book was written. It also requires us to address that history. Much of that history is painful. Indeed, it is to avoid confronting the pain of that history that black parents sometimes mobilize to ban the novel. Pushing history aside, however, is no solution to the larger challenge of dealing with its legacy. Neither is placing the task of dealing with it on one book. Therefore, to say ignorance is bliss would be a seditious act against the educational system in America.