I spent two months teaching Huckleberry Finn to my juniors. Talk about an outmoded way of thought and life.

These books have value as long as it is made clear at the outset that the reader is visiting a past that no longer can be lived, that the language and attitudes did not reflect the respect and equality that we supposedly have now.

It helps to point out that Frederick Douglass was a brilliant man who started out as a slave and rose to become, among many other things, the United States' ambassador to Haiti. He got his chance. How many others never got theirs?