Welcome to the #1000blackgirlbooks Resource Guide. I started this campaign because I wanted to read more books where black girls are the main characters. With your help we have collected over 11,000 books; many of them are have the same title, but we do have lots of unique ones as well. This guide includes 1000 of those books and more is coming.

Love,

Marley Dias
Founder
#1000BlackGirlBooks

Sadly, in today’s society we often lack the imagination to deal with some of the most deeply rooted social issues. Family and work obligations as well as our biases can stunt our imaginations; however, as adults it is our charge to foster the imagination of our youth. Marley Dias has an active sociological imagination. She imagined a world where black girls are the main, not minor, characters in children’s books. She thought she was dealing with a personal matter, but she quickly learned from the outpouring response from the public that her personal problem is in fact an engrained social issue. Children’s literature in the United States and abroad is homogeneous and exclusionary. Black girls are underrepresented and in many cases missing. Girls of color are almost completely absent relative to the majority culture.

As caregivers of children we must nurture our children’s imaginations and equip them with the resources so they can be emboldened to act. The GrassROOTS Community Foundation through Super Camp enhances girls’ sociological imagination and teaches them confidence grounded in the knowledge of history and self-hood so that they feel confident enough to feel like they can create change in their communities. Each year GrassROOTS encourages girls to develop a social action project. We choose the words social and action carefully. We want our children to understand themselves as social actors, connected to the world. In addition, we teach our girls that to achieve justice they must ACT. The #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign is Marley’s 2015 social action project. As Marley’s mom and the President of GrassROOTS Community Foundation, I have learned first hand what can happen when we foster and promote children’s love of reading, educate them about their community, and their desire to create social change as well as fan the flames of their sociological imaginations.

Dr. Janice Johnson Dias
President & Co-Founder
GrassROOTS Community Foundation
#investingirls

A love of reading is the most important legacy we can offer to our children and our students. Reading opens windows to new ideas, peoples, places, and experiences.  Reading also provides mirrors for students to see themselves and their lives reflected in the characters they meet in books. Reading builds vocabulary and background knowledge, empowering children with the tools needed to express themselves and think about the world around them. Nurturing joyful reading in children primes their brains for lifelong learning and develops important social emotional skills like stamina, reflection, and empathy.  As we build readers, we must make reading pleasurable and help children understand that reading is a skill that builds over time.

Here are a few tips for parents and educators to create environments that invite children to confidently embrace and fall in love with stories and books.

Tips for parents:

• Model reading. Read, read, read to your child, with your child, or in front your child every day.
• Immerse your child in books. Transform your entire home into a reading zone by placing books in every room.
• Affirm your child’s culture, language, and race by choosing books and stories with characters, places, and experiences that reflect their background.
• Awaken your child to new ideas, places, people, or experiences in books and stories by asking them questions and always answering the question they have.
• Empower your child by allowing them to choose books to read, whether based on what interests them or on book covers and titles.
• Arm your child by always leaving home with books. When your child gets older ask them if they have a book before leaving for school, the doctor, or a long ride.
• Cultivate your child’s use of language and words. Talk with your child about what is happening in their lives and the world around them.
• Build your child’s ability to make connections. When you watch television or movies, make connections to characters or ideas in books you have read together.
• Expand your child’s reading beyond fiction. Children have great curiosity about events taking place in the world, plants, animals, and people. It’s never too early to expose them to historical fiction or non-fiction books.
• Advocate for curricula, partnerships, books, and resources for classrooms and schools that are culturally relevant and responsive.

Tips for educators:

• Model reading. Read, read, read to your students, with your students, or in front your students every day.
• Immerse school culture in talk about books. Book talks over the intercom, book clubs, social media chats, and school-wide read alouds are a few ways to do this.
• Affirm your students’ culture, language, and race by integrating books and stories with characters, places, and experiences that reflect their backgrounds into the curriculum.
• Awaken students as participants in their own learning by having them create reading goals for themselves, for example, minutes of reading, chapters read, and reading new genres.
• Empower students by allowing them to choose books based on what interests them or on book covers and titles.
• Arm your students with the power of their own language and stories by providing them with multiple ways to make personal connections to the texts they read.
• Cultivate independent reading by creating comfortable reading spaces throughout schools. Classrooms, cafeterias, libraries, and cozy nooks in hallways are all fair game.
• Build classroom libraries of interesting, appropriate, and relevant fiction and non-fiction texts.
• Expand your reading beyond fiction. Students have great curiosity about events taking place in the world, plants, animals, and people. Use historical fiction or non-fiction books as tools to capture this interest.
• Advocate for curricula, partnerships, books, and resources for classrooms and schools that are culturally relevant and responsive.

Dr. Lauren Wells
Chief Education Officer
City of Newark

Donations are the heart of the campaign. Because we value reciprocity, we donate the books we receive to schools and community members who need them. Children deserve to have windows and mirrors to the world. Please complete the form below.