Meet 11-year-old, Marley Dias founder of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, an effort undertaken by the precocious middle schooler to add diversity to the types of children’s books kids know about. The project calls for 1,000 books with black girls as main characters – not background or minor characters – to be donated by February 11, when Dias and her fellow student organizers will take the books to her mother’s hometown of St. Mary, Jamaica.
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Dias explained the genesis of the project in an interview with Philly Voice: “I told [my mother] I was sick of reading about white boys and dogs”, said Dias, referring specifically to Where the Red Fern Grows and the Shiloh series. According to Jezebel, Dias is a former Disney Friends for Change scholarship recipient, and she’s traveled to Ghana to help feed orphans.
Dias said she also discovered the book Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry from her work on the project (I’ve read it, and it’s amazing).
And it doesn’t have to be the only thing they get, but the absence of it is clearly quite noticeable. She is reportedly halfway to her goal, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But she’s not the type to just grumble about it and switch off in class. Instead, Dias chose to do something that might just make a difference. When the mother-daughter duo hit their target, they’ll put together a reference guide compiling the book titles and authors.
Marley, who hopes to one day edit her own magazine and “continue social action” for the rest of her life, will catalog the donated books and transport them to a children’s book drive in Jamaica.
“I’m hoping to show that other girls can do this as well”, Marley says.
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Dias, who was named for the most famous Jamaican, Bob Marley, spoke to Philadelphia’s Fox29 about what inspired her to start the project.
