 Historical fiction blends details from a specific time
period in history with fictional elements to tell a
compelling story. When the author depicts these
historical details accurately, the story seems
authentic, like it really could have happened.
 * Authentic means "accurate in representation of the
facts" or "reliable."
 The novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor is a work of historical
fiction about an African American family living in rural Mississippi in 1933, at the height
of the Great Depression. In this story, the Logan family experiences racism and
injustice as they pursue their dream of owning and farming their own land.
 At a time when memories of slavery lingered in the South, owning land represented
independence for African Americans. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the
Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution
were enacted. These laws gave former slaves the rights of full citizenship: they could
vote, participate in the political process, own land, seek their own employment, and
use public accommodations. However, new laws and social practices designed to
suppress these rights were soon put in place. Legalized racial segregation and
discrimination continued in the South until after the Civil Rights Movement began in
the 1950's.
To fully understand the historical context for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, you will
need to develop some knowledge about the social, political, and economic conditions
which affected African Americans in the South during the 1930's.
The Latin root: praejudicium, Prae means “before,” and judicium means
“judgment.”
The definition of the term prejudice is not limited to racism. Prejudice
involves judgments without sufficient factual support. It includes
preconceived judgments and attitudes (positive or negative) toward
something or someone.
 Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the
North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to aid in the
production of such lucrative crops as tobacco.
 Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th
centuries, and African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations
of the new nation.
 The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the central importance of
slavery to the South’s economy.
 By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion, along with a growing
abolition movement in the North, would provoke a great debate over slavery
that would tear the nation apart in the bloody American Civil War (1861-65).
 Though the Union victory freed the nation’s 4 million slaves, the legacy of
slavery continued to influence American history, from the tumultuous years of
Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil rights movement that emerged in the
1960s, a century after emancipation.
 (CNN)The racist massacre in a South Carolina church has tipped the balance in a
decades-old tug of war over the meaning of the Confederate battle flag.
 Its champions have argued it's a symbol of Southern culture, the historic flag of the South.
 Critics say it's a racist symbol that represents a war to uphold slavery and, later, a battle to
oppose civil rights advances.
 The Confederate states went through three official flags during the four-year Civil War, but
none of them was the battle flag that's at the center of the current controversy.
 The first was the "Stars and Bars," approved in 1861.
 Like its Union sibling, it had a dark blue field in the upper left corner -- or the canton -- and
only three stripes, two red and one white. It had seven stars to represent the breakaway
states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. And
the white stars formed a circle, much like the original Betsy Ross American flag.
 The original Confederate flag's similarity to the Union flag quickly confused soldiers,
who often couldn't tell the difference between the two on smoke-filled battlefields.
 Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard wanted something that looked distinctly different.
 So politician William Porcher Miles came up with the design we know today -- the
battle flag: a blue St. Andrew's Cross with white stars on a red field.
 The Confederacy took the battle flag design and put it on the canton of its next flag, a white one. They
called it the "Stainless Banner."There was a problem.
 When the wind didn't blow, only the white was clearly visible, making it look like a white flag of
surrender.
 So, in the third incarnation of the Confederate flag, a red vertical stripe was added on the far end.
This flag was called the "Blood-Stained Banner."
 Shortly after that the South surrendered.
 After the Civil War ended, the battle flag turned up here and there only occasionally -- at
events to commemorate fallen soldiers.
 So, when did the flag explode into prominence? It was during the struggle for civil rights for
black Americans, in the middle of the 20th century.
 The first burst may have been in 1948. South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond ran for
president under the newly founded States Rights Democratic Party, also known as the
Dixiecrats. The party's purpose was clear: "We stand for the segregation of the races," said
Article 4 of its platform.
 White vigilantes bent on spreading terror to the local black families that lived in the
area.
• The KKK's is a white supremacist group. It holds that only white Christians deserve civil rights. Its
original mandate, to reverse the equality granted African -Americans after the Civil War has
expanded as the social demographics of the United States have changed. It also opposes civil rights
for Jews, gays, Catholics, and other ethnic and religious groups. Today, the various local groups that
make up the Klan often focus their hate speech on immigrants. Its members waged an underground
campaign of intimidation and violence directed at white and black Republican leaders.
• Though Congress passed legislation designed to curb Klan terrorism, the organization saw its
primary goal–the reestablishment of white supremacy–fulfilled through Democratic victories in state
legislatures across the South in the 1870s.
• After a period of decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th century,
burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing immigrants, Catholics, Jews,
blacks and organized labor.
• The civil rights movement of the 1960s also saw a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity, including bombings
of black schools and churches and violence against black and white activists in the South.
 In times gone by, tarring and feathering was a go-to method used by mobs to punish
or otherwise humiliate criminals or people believed to have wronged the community in
some way.
 Well, in most cases the tarring and feathering was simply meant to humiliate the
individual in question, not kill them. As such, pine tar was commonly used, which has
a relatively low melting point, typically around 130-140 degrees Fahrenheit (55-60 C);
certainly hot enough to cause an exceptional amount of discomfort and burns, but
nothing like the harm that would be caused by various forms of melted petroleum
based tar. Further, depending on the severity of the perceived crime or slight against
the masses, the pine tar may not, in some cases, be melted and then poured on, but
simply heated a little and then roughly rubbed on the individual to leave enough
residue on their skin for the feathers to stick- painful to be sure, but at least perhaps
avoiding the burns.
 a hanging executed by a mob, usually racially motivated
 Between 1882, when reliable data was first collected, and 1968, when the crime had
largely disappeared, there were at least 4,730 lynchings in the United States,
including some 3,440 black men and women. Most of these were in the postReconstruction South between 1882 and 1944, where southern whites used lynching
and other terror tactics to intimidate blacks into political, social, and economic
submission.
 Most blacks were lynched for outspokenness or other presumed offenses against
whites, or in the aftermath of race riots. In many cases lynchings were not
spontaneous mob violence but involved a degree of planning and law-enforcement
cooperation. Racially motivated lynchings, which often involved the mutilation and
immolation of the victim, might be witnessed by an entire local community as a
diverting spectacle.
 The Great Depression was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history
of the Western industrialized world.
 It began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, (known as Black Tuesday)
which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
 Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep
declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off
workers.
 By 1933, when the Great Depression left 13 to 15 million Americans unemployed and nearly
half of the country’s banks had failed.
 Though the relief and reform measures put into place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the economy would
not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II kicked American industry into high
gear.
The People
 Farmers were already feeling the effects
 Prices of crops went down
 Many farms foreclosed
 People could not afford luxuries
 Factories shut down
 Businesses went out
 Banks could not pay out money
 People could not pay their taxes
 Schools shut down due to lack of funds
 Many families became homeless and had to live in shanties
 In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate
facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination.

Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the case, was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, and had the
appearance of a white man. On June 7, 1892, he purchased a first-class ticket for a trip between New
Orleans and Covington, La., and took possession of a vacant seat in a white-only car. Duly arrested and
imprisoned, Plessy was brought to trial in a New Orleans court and convicted of violating the 1890 law. He
then filed a petition against the judge in that trial, Hon. John H. Ferguson, at the Louisiana Supreme Court,
arguing that the segregation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
which forbids states from denying "to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws," as well as the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery

 In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a Louisiana law passed
in 1890 "providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races." The law, which required
that all passenger railways provide separate cars for blacks and whites, stipulated that the cars be equal in
facilities, banned whites from sitting in black cars and blacks in white cars (with exception to "nurses
attending children of the other race"), and penalized passengers or railway employees for violating its
terms.
 Legalized segregation between blacks and whites.
 The Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities for
whites and blacks were constitutional encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws
that wiped out the gains made by blacks during Reconstruction.
 Railways and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters,
and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals, and other public
institutions, generally of inferior quality, were designated for blacks.
 By World War I, even places of employment were segregated, and it was not until
after World War II that an assault on Jim Crow in the South began to make headway.
 After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American
legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws.
 A country store
 It was Depression-era America, and “cotton was king” in southeast Missouri. Like many
regions in the South, plantation owners controlled thousands of acres, much of it planted
in cotton. Sharecroppers were the labor of choice. The majority African Americans and
descendants of slaves, sharecroppers worked the land for sub-standard housing and a
minimal share of the profit. “Just a step better than slavery,” was how Johnny McWilliams
described it. Another woman, a daughter of a sharecropper, recalls how she watched her
father cry after coming home with one of the landowner’s old suits as payment for an
entire year’s work. Living conditions for sharecroppers across the South were often bleak
and food and money were scarce.
Conditions worsened after the U.S. government passed the Agriculture Adjustment Act of
1932. This law provided government payments to landowners who reduced their cotton
acreage, but also required them to share 25 percent of these payments with their
sharecroppers. However, instead of sharing the money, many landowners decided to keep
it all for themselves, evicting their sharecroppers and hiring day laborers in their place.
Over 990,000 sharecroppers nationwide were left penniless and homeless.
Poorly organized and with limited power due to the Jim Crow laws of the day, African
American and poor white sharecroppers had little voice to influence the law or fight for
their rights to the payments.
 a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
Afore
prep. Just as good as "before" in some parts.
Ain't
v. cont Contraction of "am not." Not really a Southern contribution but
usually attributed to them. The problem is not the word, but the use of
the word to replace "isn't" and "aren't".
Bidnis
n. What you get down to or stay out of other people's, as in, "That ain't
none a yore dad-burned bidnis!" (Southerners don't like "s" before "n", do
you?).
Britches
n. Pert much anything worn over the legs: pants, dungarees—trousers?
What's that?