Sandbox Books: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Warmth of Other Suns

Currently in the United States, the teaching of the true racialized history of the U.S. is under attack by federal, state, and local education authorities. Policies and laws forbidding “DEI” and “CRT” in schools mean that teachers are often afraid or unable to share about slavery, Jim Crow, settler colonialism, and more.  

The anti-history policies of 2025 are merely a more concentrated version of a general white-washing (pun-intended) of history in U.S. schools. For over a decade, as BRJA has taught the history of racist immigration and naturalization laws and of redlining, we have heard participants of all races, but especially white,  remark that this is the first time they have heard of these histories. This is not a mistake. Many of us learned at best an incomplete and at worst a completely false history of the United States. 

For those of us who are parents today, we need to step in and provide our children with the history they are not receiving in school. Many Black families are used to this - with Black communities for generations transmitting a more accurate history through books, family stories, and freedom schools. By contrast, most white families have taught their children to accept the history they are taught in school and remained silent themselves on the past and present of racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy in the United States. We white parents will need to flex underused muscles to learn and teach the history our children are not receiving at school. 

It is in this context that I bring two books into the Sandbox:  “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor as a read aloud for children and “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson as background reading for their grown-ups. 

“Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” is a middle grade novel about Cassie Logan, a ten-year old Black girl living in Mississippi in the 1930s. Told from Cassie’s point of view and based on stories from Taylor’s family, the book deals age appropriately but unflinchingly with lynchings, sharecropping, segregated schools, and other realities of the white supremacist violence present in the Jim Crow South. 

I can’t remember whether my dad read this to me as a child or I read it myself. I do remember being struck by the story and the tales of what I, as a white pre-teen, perceived of individual racial hatred. However, when I reread the story as an adult ARAO educator and facilitator, “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” became deeper as I was able to pick out the strings of institutional, cultural, and structural racism that shaped the society in which Cassie and her family lived. 

A ten-year old, especially a white ten-year old, reading “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” is unlikely to pick up on the intricacies of the share-cropping system, or the myriad policies upholding the separate and highly unequal Black and white schools in Mississippi. They need an adult to help them contextualize what they are reading. 

Many of us adults, especially white adults, are uneducated on U.S. history ourselves. We need to do our own learning before we can contextualize for our children. 

“The Warmth of Other Suns” provides some of that context, providing a history of The Great Migration, including the violent anti-Black South that Black families who migrated fled. The histories of lynchings, segregation, and share-cropping that Wilkerson provides give the lie to a false history of peaceful separate lives lived in the South under Jim Crow.

. 

We can use that true history to help ourselves and our children understand the structures that Cassie and her family navigate. History alone is not enough; while doing so, we will need to remain conscious of our own biases - especially white parents (even those who are open and aware) who bring the bias of whiteness to the table in reading and interpreting information. However, with “Roll of Thunder” and other books, movies, and articles, as well as continual self-examination, we can work so that, despite national, state, and local laws and policies, our children are told a more accurate racialized history of the United States