Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

 

So one of my courses is The Black Child and the Urban Educational System. Throughout this course, my class tackles issues faced by children of color while finding solutions utilizing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. For the last project of this Fall 18 semester, we were assigned novels by Black writers and had to create a panel discussion on not only how to teach the novel, but also defend why the selected novel is important to teach.

 

Now, out of all the books, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor, was the first novel I was introduced to that was written by a person of color during my grade school days. I was in the sixth grade attending Walt Whitman middle school. It was the first time, I was in a class that attacked issues of race and systematic oppression along with allowing me to ask questions that I would be silenced for back in my elementary school. Reading this book for the second time, it brought back a sense of nostalgia and appreciation.
From Jackson, Mississippi, Mildred D. Taylor is an African American writer who spent her career discussing the adversities Black Families faced in the Deep South. Taylor’s stories are reflective of her own family and the stories they have shared with her during her youth
Taylor’s life works awarded her The Newbery Medal, The Coretta Scott King Award, The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for fiction, ALA Best Book for Young Adults & Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, etc.In her fourth novel of the Logan Family series, Mildred D. Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” centers nine year old Cassie Logan as she and her brothers Stacey, Clayton (known as Little Man) and Christopher-John, as they enter a brand new school year in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. The novel focuses on the importance of ownership for the Logan family and why it is so important during a tumultuous year of Night Riders, lynchings, burnings  and so on. Cassie comes into her own in this novel as she learns that no matter what happens to her, even when she is humiliated by white girl in public because she is black, that she has something of her own. “…For no matter how others may degrade them, the Logans possess something no one can take away…”