The America that “Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry” is set in, is so hugely different from the one that we have today. 1930’s America was a place of turbulence. The consumer market had been saturated with goods. For a while this was a good thing, people bought them and the economy did well. However, after a while, so many people had bought the goods that there was no market for them now. Mississippi was hit hard by the depression. Before the farmer had over produced cotton and the price had fallen. To sell more, they cut their prices. Within a few year, cotton prices had fallen from two dollars a bushel to just twenty-five cents a bushel.
While everyone was suffering, blacks, like the Logan family were suffering even more. The majority of blacks were share croppers and had participated boom in the first place, due to the way that they were treated by those whose land they worked on. Racism was always stronger in the Southern States than the Northern ones. Even though it had been around seventy years since the Emancipation Proclamation had been declared, many whites did not see blacks as equal to them, even though they had never been slave owners themselves. In the novel, the books that the children receive from the county are in very poor condition. They have only been given to the black children once that are in too bad a condition to be given the white children. This would never happen the other way round. While the Logan children are kept sheltered from the racism that exists, they are they only ones to react to what is written in the front of the book. Some black people did well for themselves such as Uncle Hammer, have done very well for themselves. This however creates even more tension between blacks and whites. When they see Uncle Hammer in his flash car they think, like the rich Mr Granger how come he has that? I am white; I should be doing better than him.
