When I received the book Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History, I immediately wondered if it would bear any resemblance to the V. P. Franklin and James D. Anderson book I read as an undergraduate, New Perspectives on Black Education (1978). After opening the book and browsing through the content headings, I realized that Anderson provided the forward and Franklin provided the epilogue. Using Past as Prologue, however, was written more than thirty-five years later and provides scholarship on many foci and themes that are different from the book I read as an undergraduate. In his forward, Anderson asserts that the text provides a “call to write and remake the African American past in order to make the African American future” (p. xiii). In the epilogue, Franklin argues the “need to use the African American past as prologue for the advancement of U.S. public education for both majority and minority students in the twenty-first century” (p. 357). I contend this text does just that. It furthers our understanding of the African American educational experience across time, place, and space. The text also provides a pathway for future researchers to produce scholarship that draws upon the past to envision a better educational opportunity for African American and all students in the United States.

This text provides us with scholarship on many different topics. More importantly, it highlights the research of the next generation of education historians who challenge the master narrative of inequality associated with all-black schooling, whether it is occurring in elementary schools, higher education, or community education. What the essays share is a historical underpinning of the past and its legacy for the future educational efficacy of African American people. While the editors claim it is not a complete historiography, the text provides readers with an impressive overview of the field since 1988, when Ronald Butchart published “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World’: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education” in the History of Education Quarterly.

Using Past as Prologue is divided into three parts. All of the essays in the text engage the historiography of African American education while also focusing on specific topics that span a range of geographic and educational spaces. Part I examines the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through essays by Christopher M. Span, Alisha D. Johnson, and Katrina M. Sanders. Span presents an argument about why the nineteenth century still matters. Johnson focuses on access to education in Louisiana, which upheld a different kind of legalized slavery that was more mutable than in other parts of the South. Sanders examines the role of the Catholic Church in the education of African Americans during this same period, elucidating the comingling of religion and race and how both circumscribed educational access for African Americans.

Part II focuses on African American education in the twentieth century through essays by Sharon G. Pierson, Donna Jordan-Taylor, Eddie R. Cole, Jon N. Hale, Worth Kamili Hayes, and Dionne Danns. These pieces examine the role of progressive education on historically black college or university (HBCU) lab high schools; the circular migration of southern black educators who went north for graduate study; how one president of an HBCU promoted student advocacy within the context of student excellence; student self-determination in Mississippi through Freedom Schools, and how federal policy lent itself to educational improvement through programs such as Head Start; and black private education in Chicago. Part II closes with an essay by Danns that features the voices as well as the themes garnered from students in Chicago—those who actually desegregated high schools in the urban North—an overlooked context of desegregation in the field. Additionally, Danns's chapter asks historians to review how they utilize primary sources beyond documents to actual people who lived through experiences such as desegregation.

Part III highlights contemporary history and future directions, and features the work of Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, R. Scott Baker, Christopher M. Span and Ishwanzya D. Rivers, Marybeth Gasman and Felecia Commodore, and Michelle A. Purdy. The compelling work in this final part includes essays on black alternatives for urban education, the impact of the policy shifts from equal opportunity and access to accountability, new lenses for examining the achievement gap, the future of HBCUs, and how specific texts can alter students’ understanding of the African American experience.

Using Past as Prologue moves beyond traditional history by using new data sources, documents as well as interviews, and by offering an interpretation of how present-day educational opportunities are grounded in historical opportunities. Particularly powerful was Baker's analysis of the ever-changing nature of educational policy since the onslaught of desegregation. Baker's work, along with other work in the text, is powerful because it illuminates how racism is a moving target in educational policy, and how policy and politics continually evolve to determine the success of desegregation, which never fully occurred. Consequently, we are still experiencing the vestiges of the dual system of educational opportunity, which is now refigured as accountability standards. It is important for teachers, particularly preservice teachers, to understand this evolving process of educational opportunity and access. This book, however, should be read in all disciplines so all students understand the complexity of the African American educational experience and how it has been shaped historically and today by multiple forces and contexts. The African American educational experience is not, nor will it probably ever be, a monolithic experience. I believe Using the Past as Prologue tells us why.