Mildred D. Taylor
1 book analyzed
Biography
Mildred D. Taylor was born in 1943 in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in Toledo, Ohio, after her family fled the South during the Great Migration. Her father was a master storyteller who passed down the history of the Logan family — based on Taylor's own family — with great care and pride. She attended the University of Toledo and served in the Peace Corps before returning to the United States and writing the Logan family saga. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry won the Newbery Medal in 1977. Taylor has said that she wrote the book to provide Black children with the kind of stories her father told her: stories in which Black people were not victims defined by their suffering but families defined by their love, their land, and their refusal to accept the definitions white supremacy imposed on them.