Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

Race and Ethnicity

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), like many Americans before and after him, struggled to overcome his disdain for the Other–African Americans, Irish, Chinese and other newly arrived immigrants, and Native Americans. This project focuses on interviewing a wide variety of Americans on issues of race and ethnicity, in anticipation of the 2012 presidential election, during which America’s first African-American president will be seeking re-election.

Posts in Race and Ethnicity

Wash U prof. Gerald Early relives racially tense experience with St. Louis police

Gerald Early, 59, shares his experience with racial profiling in the wealthy St. Louis suburb, Frontenac. We sat down with him to discuss race in St. Louis and the next step for racial harmony. Early is … Read more >>

Boyhood Museum’s treatment of slavery evolves

In 1996 Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain and author of Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, wrote a skeptic’s critique of Hannibal and its Mark Twain Boyhood … Read more >>

Attorney and amateur historian examines Hannibal’s slaveholding past

Hannibal, Mo., cheerily announces its intentions before you reach the downtown area. “America’s Hometown.” It’s written on a stout, sky-blue water tower that looms over Highway 61, one of the tallest structures in Hannibal. Terrell Dempsey, … Read more >>

Small town newspaper editor decides to ‘publish dead deer photos again’

I managed to resist much of Hannibal’s historic-site hucksterism—the souvenir Mark Twain t-shirts and the ride on the Too-Too Twain. But I succumbed to the Mark Twain Dinette’s 12-foot-tall rotating mug of root beer atop a … Read more >>

Hannibal exhibits ‘invisible’ black population

In some ways the Hannibal, Mo., that Faye Dant, 62, grew up in no longer exists. Dant remembers when schools in Hannibal were still segregated. Around town, there was an unspoken knowledge of the places where … Read more >>