Have you ever felt tired of the books you read in school? That's how Marley Dias felt when she was 11 years old and all of the books she read in school "were about white boys and their dogs." Dias says she couldn't connect with the characters in the books so she "couldn't learn lessons from those stories."
When Dias complained to her mother about her problem, her mother asked her what she was going to do about it. Dias thought about her options. She could just ask her dad to buy her a lot of new books. But after doing some research to find books with black girls as the main characters, she realized that there weren't very many to choose from. According to Cooperative Children's Book Center, fewer than 10 percent of children's books released in 2015 had a black person as the main character. Recently, there has been a movement to make books more diverse. Many school libraries tend to have older books, though, which are even less diverse. Dias realized she probably wasn't the only black girl feeling like she couldn't relate to her school reading curriculum.

License information: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
MPAA: PG
Go to source: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/marley-dias-the-13-year-old-activist-author