The Great Depression In Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry

From 1929 to 1939 the Great Depression turned people’s everyday lives into rough seeming to be never ending days of trying to find work and scraping up enough money to buy small unsatisfying amounts of food to feed their families. In Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Great Depression plays a vital role in the story because, both blacks and whites were suffering due to poor conditions (also lead to sharecropping), people started losing their belongings and jobs, and the whites still thought they were better than blacks. In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor writes, "Neither boy had on shoes, and their Sunday clothing, patched and worn, hung loosely upon their frail frames."(Taylor 152). This quote from Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, shows that the boys didn’t have enough money to buy any decent clothes (or sometimes food) and this is how it was for many people, black or white. Many of the houses were old and looked about ready to fall apart: "Consisting of four weather-beaten wooden houses on stilts of brick,..." (Taylor 140). These examples show that the people of America were suffering. Most people had to head to California to find jobs, but soon there were too many people and not

white drama, loss of homes and belongings, and all of the suffering that was going on. Mildred Taylor shows in her book what life was like back during the Great Depression, it also is showing the hardships people back then had to face and what lengths they had to go to make sure their families were fead. So many people suffered during that era no matter what race a person was, even if people had a jobs it would still be hard to pay the bills because of all the other necessities you needed to purchase. The Great Depression had a huge impact in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and in real