Fewer than 10 percent of children's books released in the US in 2015 had a black person as the main character. That's according to a study from the University of Wisconsin - and it's led to some American kids speaking out to try and change things, as our New York correspondent Lorna Shaddick reports.
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UPSOT children
An after school reading workshop in New York City, focusing on diversity. The idea - to get elementary school kids reading in their spare time...and reading about children who look like them. But those books can be hard to find, says Ameerah Anderson, who's just seven.
SOT - Ameerah Anderson
I think that African American kids should be in books. // I would like to see a girl like me.
A student volunteer at the workshop, Cynthia Dundee, feels the same.
SOT - Cyndia Dundee, student volunteer
Some children - they feel like they're less of a person because of their skin colour when that's really not the case. If they saw more different kinds of diverse books with different girls and boys, maybe they wouldn't feel that way.
UPSOT Marley reciting poem
Marley Dias agrees…. The 11 year old from New Jersey started a Twitter campaign, black girl books, to find a thousand books with main characters SHE could relate to - raising awareness of the need for more diversity in children's literature.
And campaigns like that are making an impact. The Cooperative Children's Book Centre released statistics in April this year on the representation of people of colour in kids' literature - showing the number of children's books by and about African Americans jumped 42% between 2014 and 2015. But they still only accounted for about 11% of all the children's books surveyed.
Jacqueline Woodson, the author of one book featuring an African American heroine, Brown Girl Dreaming, knows how important it is to identify with the characters you read about.
SOT - Jacqueline Woodson, Author
Rudine Simms Bishop talks a lot about windows and mirrors and how children need both. They need reflections of themselves on the pages and they need windows into other worlds on the pages, so that they can have experiences that they might not otherwise have.
And expert Dr. Detra Price Dennis from Columbia University say it's not just young black girls who are under-represented in books:
SOT - Dr. Detra Price-Dennis, Assistant Professor, Teachers' College, Columbia University
One project I'm currently working on is tracing all of the books published from 2000 until 2015, that have African American males as protagonists, just to see how African American males are depicted in the literary imagination. // All of the books had black males that were struggling or their parents were in jail - there was always some kind of problem. And my son's life didn't look like that. So although there was representation, it really wasn't a full picture of who African American males could be.