“Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” - Mildred D. Taylor

This novel is a must-read. Honestly. No hyperbole intended. If your tween is struggling to wrap their mind around the racial injustice that finally seems to be making the news (as it should), read this book together! I still vividly recall the powerful emotions of helplessness and sadness that I felt when I read this book as a child. It served to humanize the dire consequences of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. 

Unfortunately, it hasn’t appeared on my ten-year-old son’s curriculum, yet. We decided to tackle this novel over the summer, at the height of the BLM protests. My son had been following the news of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the BLM movement. He wanted to know what the term “systemic racism” meant. Reading this book helped him form context for just how long these injustices have formed the bedrock of American society. I wanted him to have a sense that the injustices he was reading about and seeing on tv were not occurring in some sort of vacuum; that there was deep, historical precedent for all of it. I feel sometimes, that children’s history books continue to propagate the dangerous myth that with Emancipation came full equality for Black people; that suddenly overnight, generations of injustice were reversed and the playing field suddenly equalized.

I noticed that my son often had to read it in short segments, pausing and putting it down to process the events. More than once, he would ask with anguish in his voice, “why was everything stacked against Cassie and the Logan family?”. This provided a backdrop against which I could discuss systemic racism with him, on a basic level. 

I’ll also note, that kids are incredibly perceptive. Mine astutely compared 45’s 2nd impeachment proceedings to an inverse of the treatment of TJ. The outcome was foregone in both cases, by a jury comprised in part of co-conspirators or peers who benefited from the outcome.

Recommended: 5th grade

Preceded by “Song of the Trees” and followed by “Let the Circle Be Unbroken”.