“It is one of those ‘classic books’ that’s existed in our school systems for so long. My great-grandparents remember when that book came out. I read it last year and it was still assigned. Every single year they wanted us to read a book about a white boy and his dog.”
Dias decided to collect books with black girl leads to raise awareness of books with diverse characters and the over-representation of books with white leads in the school system. Her target was 1,000 books, which she would then send to a school in Jamaica that her mother had attended. “I didn’t pick my own school because I realized that even in all-black spaces like Jamaica, where it is majority black people, they don’t see themselves, and the narratives of white people are still being pushed on to people.”
She created a hashtag, #1000BlackGirlBooks, which started to pick up pace and soon catapulted the young Dias into the limelight…
