From The Huffington Post
It happened a couple of years ago in Manchester, Connecticut, about a 16-minute drive from the rambling brick house where Mark Twain wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in longhand at a small table tucked into the corner of his billiard room.
A parent complained that the book was demeaning to African Americans because of its frequent use of the word “nigger,” sparking a moratorium on classroom use of the classic. Meetings and hearings followed, where the value of the book and its use of the word was debated thoroughly, with plenty of bitterness and resentment on both sides.
The book remains one of the most-banned books in the United States, ever since the Concord, Mass. Public Library rejected it for its “coarse language” in 1885, the year the book was first published in the United States. But as we near the 125th anniversary of that publication on February 18, the debate, if anything, has gotten hotter.
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