Where Are the People of Color?

"Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map."

In this quote from his New York Times opinion piece, "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" children's book author Walter Dean Myers is asking an important question.  The publishers of this catalogue of children's books written in Sierra Leone and Liberia, also wanted the children who read them to recognize themselves and their own "landscapes" as they read.