Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.

Vividly rendering the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of a bygone rural south, these closely connected stories revolve around the sometimes tragic lives of a black farming couple, Killdee and Rose Pinesett. When it first appeared in the 1920s, Green Thursday's unsentimental portrayal of African Americans was startlingly ahead of its time - enough so to inspire hate mail from white Southerners accusing the author, herself white, of betraying her race. At the same time, however, Green Thursday was praised by reviewers and social observers from all quarters, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who called it "a beautiful book".

Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.