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Mark Twain was not a racist; certainly not considering the day and age in which he lived. His world was one where those with black skin were considered less than human, and in that world he chose to write a story that might do a bit to change those attitudes. In so doing, he sought to engage his target audience with a story that would teach but not preach, and so he invented as his hero a young boy so thoroughly grounded in prejudice that it even came as a surprise to him to learn that blacks had families for which they could actually care. Remove Huckelberry's racial epithets and you run the risk of missing the remarkable transition in Huckelberry's thinking of Jim from simply being "Miss Watson's big nigger" to "My friend, Jim," which is pretty much the whole point of the book.
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