For The Culture! Review of ‘Little Heroes of Color’

When I pulled back the cover of Little Heroes of Color, I was greeted with a heartfelt dedication to the author’s three children. Under that was a paragraph about how he, David Heredia is the father of two daughters and a son who are always eager to learn about people who look like them, especially innovators and visionaries. This is a tale that you’ve no doubt, heard before–especially in the publishing world, where children of color still have to search diligently for books about kids who look like them on the cover.

At 24 pages, this board book is for the younger crowd–preschoolers. However, I wouldn’t count this one out from being a gift for a baby shower or for a little one’s first birthday as we all know the importance of reading to your little ones. I also can not stress enough how picture books help children develop in many ways including strengthening visual thinking skills and even aiding them in creating dialogue about the world they live in. Heredia’s book is filled with a pretty diverse group of people of color: 50 trailblazers from a range of races and ethnicities. There’s folks I know of like Yuri Kochiyama and Ernie Barnes to folks that I’ve just recently learned about in recent years like Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and Maya Lin and even folks I’ve never known about like Dr. Wanda Diaz-Merced and Arvind Cupta. Here, young readers have a book that is pretty accessible filled with a cartoony art style, simple captions and bright colors in the background to help …