Mark Twain a racist? Why, that is an unwarrantable perspective, sir!

This goes back to an old classroom debate from my college days that is now decided by Mark Twain’s own words in his autobiography (volume 1). [1]

I was studying American literature back in the “Middle Ages”—at Portland State in the ‘70s. The debate jumped me like a giant Calaveras frog. A student in my class said he believed Mark Twain to be a racist and that he favored slavery!

Mark Twain does not dwell on racial topics in his autobiography. But he wrote enough for me to settle that long-ago debate, as if there ever was a doubt. And a funny coincidence made me smile contentedly when I read these words of his: “… slavery was a bald, grotesque and unwarrantable usurpation.”

Ha!  "Unwarrantable,” he said. Over a century ago, Mark Twain wrote that slavery was an unwarrantable usurpation.

Forty years after my fellow student aired his alternate and startling perspective, I read Mark Twain’s dismissal of human bondage---unwarrantable, he said.

For the last decade, you understand, I have earned my keep as a warranty analyst, trained at great length to know precisely what is warrantable and what is not.

Now I have the proof in Twain’s own words that doubting his belief in equality and fairness for all is—well, un-warrantable.

Image: Mark Twain in his later years[2]

[1] Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume I, see Amazon or Powell’s Books: http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Mark-Twain-Volume-Authoritative/dp/0520267192 and http://www.powells.com/s?kw=autobiography+of+mark+twain&class=

[2] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twain1909.jpg – photo in the public domain in the U.S. where copyright has expired