People

By Guy D. Garcia

To many a reader, Mark Twain is the foremost American novelist and his masterwork is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This year, the book's centenary, has brought several Huck Finn stage productions. It has also brought a renewed outcry from some who want the novel barred from school libraries. The book is racist, say these critics, who note that it repeatedly uses the word nigger and that it distresses young black students. Last week defenders of Huck as a satire of racism were bolstered by news that Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens, had recorded his views of black and white in a private letter. He had been asked to support the education of Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first black students to attend Yale Law School. "I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger," Clemens wrote to the dean in the 1885 letter, which has been authenticated by Yale Scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. "But I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs; & we should pay for it." Like Huck, Clemens remained true to his word on important matters: he paid for McGuinn's board until his 1887 graduation. McGuinn went on to become a mentor and idol of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.