When I was growing up, there was no multicultural literature. There probably wasn’t even the term “multicultural.” I was an avid reader but I probably only read maybe two books that included girls who looked like me, and one of them was a book that was published in the 1940’s that my mother recommended that I read. It was called Bright April.
I can remember that book. Bright April was a Brownie and I was a Brownie at the time. I could kind of relate. There were some racial issues in the book so I read those books and maybe I also read Sounder.
Sounder was out when I was a kid and there were some YA books — young adult books that I read like Gordon Park’s The Learning Tree. But when I was in the picture book stage in elementary school, there weren’t books that I read that had characters who looked like me. So that was a void in my life. I was just happy to see that there were so many more opportunities for my kids to read books about children of color.