Racism was a big problem during the 1930s in America, especially in Mississippi. Racism is when a certain group/person physically or verbally offends someone because of their culture, religion, skin colour or beliefs. In Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry the racism is about the colour of people’s skin, white or black. The white people were extremely cruel to the black people as the whites thought they were superior to the blacks. Blacks were thought of as second class citizens as their ancestors where originally brought to America as slaves. Black people in the 1930s in Mississippi were faced with discrimination in many areas of their everyday lives. Black people were not allowed to rent hotel rooms; they were not allowed to sit at the front of public buses. They weren’t even allowed to enter through the front doors of a shop or use the same public restroom as the white people.
The black children in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry were humiliated daily by full buses of Jefferson Davis County School pupils. Most of the pupils on the buses were white children and they were very cruel people. The Logan family were walking to school when the Jefferson Davis County School bus came into their sight. They all jumped off the road onto the bank apart from Little Man as he did not want to get his clothes dirty. The bus was very close when Stacey said to Little man ‘You’re gonna get them a whole lot dirtier if you stay down there’. Little man did not want to give in and jump down off the road like the others so he ended up getting drenched when the bus passed by him. A couple of days later the black children decided to leave earlier for their walk to school to try an avoid getting so dirty. After a while T.J persuaded the Logan children to get down from the bank to walk on the road to get out of the dirt. Unfortunately it wasn’t long before they could see the school bus approaching and as described by Cassie ‘Five minutes later they were skidding like frightened puppies’, as they...