Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Themes

Welcome to Mississippi, circa 1933. Bad news: We're stuck squarely in the era of the American South's segregation and Jim Crow laws. We're hanging out with these characters before the Civil Rights...

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words… well, unfortunately, they can actually hurt you. We're going to put it right out there: some of the language used in this novel is not pretty, a...

So, you think the Great Recession is bad? Try on the Great Depression for size. And if you think that's bad, try being a poor black family during the Great Depression. That's our situation in Roll...

Church and church activities are big time integrated into the daily life of the black community in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. You can tell it's important, because even the school's name has reli...

Welcome to the point of the entire novel. In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the African-American characters have to persevere against many kinds of injustice caused by the racist oppression in the S...

We're not dealing with a huge city where people are all nameless and faceless. In Taylor's setting, everyone knows everyone else. Plus, they know what you've been up to. For example, cheating on a...

In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, it's all about the land. Families like the Averys and the Turners are at the mercy of their landowners for economic prosperity (or, economic failure, more like it)....

Talk about separate and unequal: Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School (the African-American school) is lacking all of the necessary things that Jefferson Davis County School (the white schoo...

Do you think it's strange that Cassie doesn't seem to have a BFF? Her closest ties are with her family (Stacey, Christopher-John and Little Man). She rarely does anything without one of them, and s...