Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Mildred D. Taylor (1976)
“A nine-year-old girl in Depression-era Mississippi learns that the land her family owns is the only thing standing between them and annihilation.”
Short Summary
Cassie Logan, a nine-year-old Black girl in 1933 Mississippi, narrates a year in which her family faces white-supremacist violence, economic persecution, and the threat of losing the land her grandparents bought. Her father David Logan leads a quiet, determined resistance. The family survives — but not without cost. A beloved friend is nearly lynched, and the land itself is burned to stop a worse violence. Cassie learns, slowly and painfully, what it means to live with dignity in a world designed to destroy it.
Detailed Summary
Cassie Logan is nine years old, sharp-tongued, proud, and not yet fully awake to the danger of the world she lives in. She and her brothers Stacey, Christopher-John, and Little Man walk four miles to the segregated Great Faith school in rural Mississippi, where Black children receive the white schoo...