Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
novel by Mildred D. Taylor
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a 1977 Newbery Medal awarded novel by Mildred D. Taylor. It is a part of her Logan family series, a sequel to her 1975 novella Song of the Trees.
In the book, Taylor explores the struggles of African Americans in 1930s Mississippi through the perspective of nine-year-old Cassie Logan. The novel contains several themes, including Jim Crow segregation, Black landownership, sharecropping, the Great Depression, and lynching.
Plot
In 1933, 9-year-old Cassie Logan lives in rural Mississippi with her three brothers, Stacey (12 years old), Christopher-John (7 years old), and Clayton Chester, nicknamed "Little Man" (6 years old). Unlike most black families
who sharecropped during this time, the Logan family owns the land on which they reside. It originally belonged to a white plantation owner, Harlan Granger, who sold it to cover his taxes during Reconstruction.
Rather than a single, overarching storyline, the bulk of the novel consists of several intertwining plots, each involving one or more members of the Logan family and illustrating various aspects of black/white interactions during the nadir of American race relations. Several episodes feature black characters being humiliated by powerful white citizens and being forced to weigh the potential cost of standing up for themselves.
At school, Cassie and Little Man notice that the books they use were originally distributed to the white children, and given to the black students once they wore out.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” is novel by Mildred D. Taylor. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Roll, Thunder and Hear, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “novel by Mildred D. Taylor” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7360913. VIAF identifies the subject as 309273932. The Library of Congress control number is no2018078611. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1975 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.