Newbery Wayback Machine: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor (1977)

Cassie Logan lives with her family -- her parents, her three brothers, her grandmother, and a family friend, Mr. Morrison -- in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. These are hard times and a hard place for a Black family, but the Logans have something that serves as their anchor -- four hundred acres of land, which they work and protect with fierceness and joy. However, neither the bonds of family nor the grounding of the land can save Cassie from a hard education in the racism of her surroundings. Incident after incident drives this point home, until a climatic summer night involving a robbery, a lynching attempt, and a fire that threatens everything the Logans have.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry puts the reader so firmly in its setting that I could almost feel the red dust between my toes. This also extends to the characters, each of whom seemed three-dimensional and real. Each of Cassie's family members, all the way from Big Ma to her youngest brother, Little Man, have their own hopes and fears, dreams and desires. The secondary characters also come alive, with even the worst of them, such as the odious White storekeeper Kaleb Wallace, remaining rooted in reality. It's hard to overstate how well Mildred D. Taylor describes the place, time, and people in this novel.

As legendary children's literature critic Zena Sutherland once wrote (in a positive overview of the novel), "[Roll of Thunder] is not an unflawed book, but it is a memorable one." There are, indeed, some places where it's possible to quibble with the plotting; most notable to me is Little Man and Cassie's reaction to seeing their race written inside their school readers, which felt to me like it happens way too early in the book, given the way the overall plot arc involves the children coming to a realization of how permeated with racism the world around them is. But overall, the book works so well that my mind didn't linger on any plot difficulties or other blemishes.

1976 was a strong year for American children's literature. The 1977 Newbery Committee listed two honor books, Abel's Island, by William Steig, and A String in the Harp, by Nancy Bond; other well-regarded titles from the year include Frog and Toad All Year, by Arnold Lobel; The Missing Piece, by Shel Silverstein; and Summer of the Monkeys, by Wilson Rawls. Even in that company, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry stands as a worthy winner, and an enduring classic in the Newbery canon.