The Marriage Between Past and Present As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain portrays the unjust and cruel treatment of African-Americans in pre-Civil War Southern society. However, although written to depict a society that is now more than a decade old, the aspects of racism and unjust treatment still occur in modern-day society as African Americans at Starbucks were under arrest for essentially being black, African-Americans are, and a town stuck in the past held segregated proms between blacks and whites. Throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the societal norms that people in the South exhibit portray the social injustices …show more content…
It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote ag’in’ ” (27). Pap refuses to allow the government to put an African-American on his level in society due to his racist, but disturbingly real image of African-Americans as slaves. However, Pap’s stubbornness is shared throughout Southern society before the Civil War. The South’s strongly developed social construct of Aryan superiority turned the Southern whites against the blacks. Furthermore, Huck meets a boy after searching for Jim, who also displays the Southern stubbornness to not be equal with a slave. When speaking with Huck about Jim’s whereabouts, the boy reveals his dehumanizing stance on Jim saying, “ ‘Well, I reckon! There’s two hundred dollars’ reward on him. It’s like picking up money out’n the road’ ” (211). The boy does not see Jim as a person, but rather an item for personal gain. Similar to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, modern-day society still deals with the