Youth Book Club Kit Questions

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry By Mildred Taylor

1. What are sharecroppers? Are they black or white? How are the lives of the white and black children different in this novel? Make a list.

2. When Cassie and her brothers are teased by the white children riding on the school bus, how do they feel? How did it make you feel to read that? How do the black children get back at the school bus driver?

3. Why is it important when Cassie’s mother changes the front of the books at school? How would it feel to have everything at your school be secondhand?

4. What is the role of education in the Logan family? How does it compare to the value or importance of religion or material wealth (land) to the Logan’s.

5. Why is it dangerous to boycott the local store? Is it worth it? Have you ever wanted to boycott somewhere? Why? How do the landowners and storekeepers take advantage of the sharecroppers?

6. Why is land so important to the Logan family?

7. Why do the adults, particularly the women fear the white “night men”? Why do they react to trouble the way they do? Why was Mama so afraid when Hammer left the house? In what ways are Mama and Big Ma heroes?

8. Why does Stacy continue being friends with TJ?

9. Why did Papa tell the children it is not wise to have too much to do with white people?

10. How does Uncle Hammer’s visit affect the family?

11. What does Mr. Jamison do to help the Logan’s and the black community? Is he a realistic character? Why or why not?

12. What about T.J. In what ways does he represent problems in contemporary communities? (peer pressure, poverty, weapons, drinking) Wash his decline inevitable? Besides his own, whose fault was his problems? Why?