In All the Days Past, All the Days To Come (Viking, Jan. 7), the final book in Mildred D. Taylor’s Cassie Logan series, Cassie is now a young woman experiencing love and loss amid the unfolding of the civil rights movement. Taylor’s five-book saga has centered around the Logans, an African American family in Mississippi, spanning more than 40 years; it includes Song of the Trees (1975), the Newbery Award–winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), the Coretta Scott King Award–winning Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Road to Memphis (1990), and The Land (2001), a series prequel.

All the Days Past, All the Days To Come reunited Taylor with Viking editor Regina Hayes, who acquired and edited Song of the Trees after it won a Council on Interracial Books writing contest. Hayes, who was at Dial Press at the time, recalls by telephone, “The first book was an illustrated storybook for middle readers. But when Roll of Thunder came in, it was this fully realized, rich novel with just wonderful storytelling and characters that captured you. And it was really quite astonishing. I got chills when it came in.”

Taylor went on to author six more books at Dial after Hayes left for Viking. Hayes says, “Even at that point, Mildred had in her mind that she was going to bring this story all the way into Cassie’s adult years and that she would ultimately become a lawyer and join the civil rights movement.”

Thanks to publishing industry mergers, Taylor and Hayes found themselves once again under the same corporate umbrella for the last book in the Logan family series. “All the Days Past, All the Days To Come is a history of what really happened to civil rights in America after the Second World War,” Hayes says. “Cassie’s brothers have come back home from the war, and she has just finished college. The story follows through her early adulthood, her marriage, and her decision to go to law school and move to Boston to become a lawyer. And then she goes back to Mississippi because she feels a responsibility to participate in the voter registration drive there.

“Along the way, there are some really tragic moments and great family moments as well. There’s an epilogue where Cassie and members of her church, Great Faith Church, are on a bus retracing the route of the Freedom Riders and going to Washington for the Obama inauguration. It makes you realize how optimistic we all were at that point.”

Readers of the Logan series span generations, which Hayes believes speaks to both the timeliness and timelessness of the books and to Taylor’s legacy. “So many writers have cited Roll of Thunder as the book that made them want to be writers, including Jacqueline Woodson and Angie Thomas. It’s quite a legacy to have inspired such writers. But the resonance? I think it’s the characters. It’s the family. You really, really want to be part of that family. Even with all the terrible things that happen, there is such warmth and love and support for one another.”

Taylor has said that the Logan family is representation of her family of strong black women and men and their experiences from the Great Depression to the present day. She recently told Hayes: “My legacy is that I have told the story of a black family—symbolic of millions—who survived slavery and the racism of America and fought for the equal rights due to all Americans.”

Hayes says, “Mildred shared with me that she told her cousin that she didn’t think she could finish this [last] book. And her cousin said, ‘You have to finish it because we are the last generation who knows what it was really like to live in the segregated South.’ There’s a scene where they’re driving south, and they cross the Mason-Dixon line. Mildred writes about the terror that they felt from then on until they reached their home. Going down the rural roads where there were no witnesses and how they had to bring enough food to last them for the whole trip because they couldn’t stop at any restaurant [because of Jim Crow laws]. Certainly we have terrible things happening now, but this provides a context.

“Mildred has written this deeply personal story, but it also captures so much history [in a way that is] interesting and readable. That’s the gift of a great storyteller. She’s able to find story in history in a very vivid way.”

Deesha Philyaw is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce and author of the forthcoming short-story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.