"An overview of efforts to provide formal schooling to Black children and youth in North America, from the Colonial period to the present, both in the South and in the North and Canada The account includes the damaging racial assumptions of the White majority, the often-heroic efforts of Black parents and teachers to provide education, the contributions of Black churches and White missionary organizations during Reconstruction and long after, formal and informal mechanisms of segregation in the North as well as the South, resistance to desegregation in recent decades, and new approaches to education that reduce the racial achievement gap"--