Further, the characterizations of pre-World War II blacks consisted of slaves, menial workers, or sharecroppers. Via Reading Is Fundamental, "'Across the country,' she stated in that piece, '6,340,000 nonwhite children are learning to read and to understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them.'" According to Larrick's survey of trade books over a three-year period, "only four-fifths of one percent" of those works included contemporary black Americans as characters. Marc Aronson, author of Race: A History Beyond Black and White, described that piece to The Atlantic Wire as "a call to arms." Larrick had been inspired to write the piece, which criticized the omission of black characters in children's literature, after a 5-year-old black girl asked why all the kids in the books she read were white. In 1965, 11 years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools, Nancy Larrick wrote an article titled "The All-White World of Children's Books" for the Saturday Review. literature-from the now nostalgia-infused stories we devoured as kids to more contemporary tomes being read by young people today. for Grownups is a weekly series in which we talk about Y.A. This article is from the archive of our partner.
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