11 yr-old Founder, Marley Dias Continues Her Cause to Bring Awareness With #1000BlackGirlBooks

She’s been featured on Ellen, Michelle Obama has honored her, she has shared a platform with Oprah and she has recently been named editor-in-residence for Elle Magazine. Her name is Marley Dias, she’s 11-years-old, in the fifth grade, and she is making waves as the founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, an initiative to collect stories about young girls and women of color.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” That was the question posed by Marley Dias’ mom after the 5th grader voiced her frustrations regarding the book choices being offered within the classes at her school. 11-yr-old Marley had reached a level of frustration because she loved books. At home, she had a diverse array of books to choose from, however her choices at school were limited. She tells NPR what caused her frustrations:

“We were only reading books such as ‘Where The Red Fern Grows,’ ‘Crash,’ the ‘Shiloh’ series and ‘Old Yeller,’ so I noticed that. Then I was frustrated because I was never reading books about black girls or any different type of character.”

After her mom posed the question asking what she planned on doing about it, she launched her own initiative and called it #1000BlackGirlBooks. The goal: to gather 1000 books that better represented black girls. Instead of gathering 1,000 books, Marley and her team collected over 7,000 books. Since the start of her campaign Marley has collected $3,000 in donations from At Stacked Books, Barnes and Noble has donated books to her book drive, and Ellen in collaboration with Shutterfly donated $10,000 to #1000BlackGirlBooks. Now that she has surpassed her goal, Marley hopes to “donate to other schools where students are experiencing the same frustration”.

Walk into any major bookstore retailer and there is an obvious lack of diversity when it comes to literature depicting black characters – especially children’s literature. In a recent blog, Kelly Jensen of At Stacked Books stated:

“It didn’t hit me how difficult finding ‘black girl books’ truly was until I’d exhausted the obvious, exhausted the less obvious, and still have some money left over to find further titles. I am eager to see how Marley completes this dream of hers, as well as what her library will look like, but I’m also saddened to see so clearly the very thing she was talking about (and that so many others have and continue talking about): these books are not out there, not obvious, and that needs to change.”

Recent statistics gathered by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center stated, of the 3,500 books surveyed in 2014, only 84 were written by Africans or African Americans and only 180 featured Africans or African American characters.

Meanwhile, Marley has been described as “an agent for change” and she has many new goals and initiatives planned in order to spread awareness about the need for more cultural representation in American literature. Marley is confident about her cause,

“I will continue to do my part at getting black girls’ voices heard, Not just one voice but all of our voices to be heard. That’s why I collect a variety of books where black girls are the main characters. The books are diverse, like black girls are diverse.”

By the way, if you are interested in beginning or expanding your own collection of ‘black girl books’, some of Marley’s favorites are listed below:

Sources:

CCBC