Cultures of American Childhood

Children were not a big concern during this time because they were not treated equally. In the Civil Rights for Kids reading that was assigned for this week's reading, mentions very little about children. It does not mention how children are supposed to be treated. Instead, it mentions how colored children had to attend specific schools, restaurants, and restrooms (also known as the Jim Crow Laws). Children had to face these situations due to the color of their skin. In the novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Cassie, Stacey, Little Man, and Christopher John were all victims of the hate that went around in their town. At school, they received used, ripped, poor quality books. White children, such as Lillian Jean, made Cassie carry her books around because Cassie is a "nigger". When the Logan children walked to school, they would watch the white children ride to school in a bus, and the bus driver would purposely splash the Logan children with mud and water when they would walk to school. The children in the school bus and the bus driver would laugh and enjoy to see the harm they would cause to the Logan children. These children would also face the discrimination with white adults. Mr. and Mrs. Logan did not want their children going to the Wallace store for the same reason. The Wallace's have always treated them terribly, and when the children did attend the store, Cassie was thrown off the road by Lillian Jean's father and was called a "nigger" as well. These children face hate, violence, discrimination, and inequality throughout the whole novel. At the beginning, the children did not seem to understand why they had to do certain things, such as never defending themselves or speaking up. They begin to understand later in the novel, and these children begin to create hate toward those who do not show equality. Eventually, they began to learn how to deal with situations such as running toward the bank when the bus was coming so they would not get splashed. Little Man was never able to understand why they would always wet him and his clothes and shoes. He had a very hard time to deal with this situation, but eventually these children faced this discrimination in an inappropriate matter. These children had no option sometimes to deal with these hate acts, but it comes to show how children had to deal with these violent acts.

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Suzanne Roszak 

RE: Noeli J's Presentation and Responses

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Thanks to everyone for your hard work on this conversation! One thing to keep in mind as you look toward the midterm is the importance of recognizing children's acts of protest even when they might go against our culture's prevailing ideals of non-violent protest. As a culture, we tend to be biased toward non-violent protest, forgetting examples in the longer arc of U.S. history like the American Revolution itself, in which physical acts of self-defense were actually necessary for protest and liberation. This can lead us to take a hypocritical position on marginalized groups' acts of protest, in which, drawing on ideas of "respectability politics," we hold marginalized groups to a higher standard for what their forms of protest should supposedly look like than the U.S. as a national state has actually upheld in its history at large. This conventional wisdom unfairly suggests that the marginalized group, no matter how much violence is directed toward it by the dominant culture, is not supposed to defend itself physically and is instead supposed to remain perfectly "calm" and "peaceful" in its responses to discrimination and even in its responses to threats to the physical survival of the community. So, for instance, some have expected Black activists to be perfectly non-violent in their responses to the physical violence of white supremacists, denying them what others would argue are ethically necessary means for them to defend themselves.

So, how does all of this apply to Roll of Thunder? In this particular novel, physical self-defense, even when it looks violent, is not necessarily an act of "hate"; for instance, the strategy that Cassie uses to vanquish Lillian Jean, while it involves a degree of physical violence, seems to be the best, most effective method of self-defense for Cassie in her position. One of the complexities of the novel is that it forces readers to deal with these ethical gray areas rather than resorting to oversimplified reactions that assume that all forms of protest except for non-violence are acts of hate and are ethically wrong. In this way, while Taylor's novel was written for a child audience, it reflects the larger currents of the Black nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Black activists and intellectuals carefully considered the possible merits and/or necessity of physical self-defense in the face of widespread white supremacist violence. (This is not to say that you personally have to agree with this aspect of the novel -- but it's important to keep it in mind nonetheless.)

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