“I was not surprised but definitely disappointed,” she says. Breau is a project coordinator at Diverse BookFinder, an organization dedicated to collecting, researching, and promoting children’s books with diverse characters. It prepares you to be a better citizen of the world.”Īfter children’s literature researcher Andrea Breau read about Martin’s work in The Atlantic last year, she dug into the data. “If you have a diverse diet of books that introduce you to all kinds of different ways of being,” Martin says, “you develop more empathy. Children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop famously wrote that books serve as “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.” They let young readers understand others, see themselves, and escape into other worlds as they build an identity and locate themselves in our planet’s tangle of life.

Today, as a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, she researches and draws attention to the dearth of Black protagonists in children’s books about nature. She’d felt at home in nature since she was a little girl, collecting toads with her cousins in the red clay of the South Carolina Midlands.

In the days of slavery, the men and women who set out north for freedom were stalked by terror, death, and dogs. (John Muir, by contrast, walked from Indiana to Florida on a lark just two years after Appomattox.) This year, when Amy Cooper called the police on Black birder Christian Cooper in Central Park, the age-old message was clear: you don’t belong here.ĭespite her mom’s concern, Martin went west anyway in the late eighties. Why are you going into the woods? It’s not a safe place,’” Martin recalls. When professor and children’s book critic Michelle Martin announced that she wanted to move to California to pursue outdoor education, her mother was skeptical. “She was like, ‘Black people have been trying to get out of the woods for generations.

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