The character of Jim in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was written as a condemnation of the Jim Crow regimes that were springing up across the South as the Reconstruction Era slowly came to an end. Twain’s Jim was the first Black character in popular American literature that can be thought of as being written in depth and without becoming another racist caricature. The story, set before the civil war, has been the subject of ongoing scholarship and contestation ever since. In t
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