Books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
In 1933 Mississippi, nine-year-old Cassie Logan and her family, Black landowners determined to keep their land, face the cruelty of segregation and the night riders, and Cassie learns what it costs her parents to stand firm.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Help
In 1962 Jackson a young white graduate secretly co-writes a book with the black maids of her friends, and Mississippi is exactly as dangerous about it as you would expect.
The Nickel Boys
Two Black boys at a reform school in Jim Crow Florida endure systematic brutality, told in spare prose based on a real institution's buried history.
To Kill a Mockingbird
A lawyer in Depression-era Alabama defends a Black man falsely accused of rape, as seen through the eyes of his young daughter.
The Four Winds
In 1934, as drought and dust storms ruin the Texas Panhandle farm she has worked for years, Elsa Martinelli must choose between staying with the land and taking her two children west to California, where the promise of work is not what it seems.
The Calamity Club
In Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, Meg, an eleven-year-old left by her mother at the county orphan asylum for girls, and Birdie, who has come to town to beg her socialite sister for money to save the family home, find their lives tangling together in the depths of the Depression.
The Hate U Give
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between the poor Black neighbourhood where she lives and the wealthy, mostly white prep school she attends, and when she sees a police officer shoot her unarmed childhood friend Khalil, everyone wants to know what she saw.
Kin
Vernice and Annie, two motherless girls who grew up as best friends in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, take very different paths through the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, Vernice to Spelman College in Atlanta and a world of privilege, Annie in search of the mother who left her.
The Secret Life of Bees
In 1964 South Carolina a fourteen-year-old white girl runs off with her black housekeeper to a pink house kept by three beekeeping sisters who know the secret of her dead mother.
The Reformatory
In 1950 Florida, twelve-year-old Robert Stephens is sent to the segregated Gracetown School for Boys for kicking a white boy who harassed his sister, and finds it haunted by boys who never left, while his sister Gloria fights to get him out.
Black Boy
Richard Wright's memoir of growing up hungry and defiant in the Jim Crow South, in Mississippi, Arkansas and Memphis, and of the books that convinced him there was a way out.
The Sweetness of Water
In Georgia in the last days of the Civil War, George Walker, a reclusive farmer grieving his son, takes on two newly freed brothers, Prentiss and Landry, to work his land.
Horse
The story of Lexington, the most celebrated racehorse in nineteenth-century America, and Jarret, the enslaved groom who raised him, connects to a 1950s New York art dealer and, in 2019, to a Smithsonian scientist and a Nigerian-American art historian who uncover their story.