In 1966, when Stokely Carmichael delivered his stirring call for ‘Black Power’ in the United States, many feared the young activist had set ablaze the unifying bridge built by civil rights activists over the previous decade. To the fearful, Black Power represented a dramatic shift from efforts of peaceful negotiation to militant demand; from nonviolence to violence; from cohesion to disunity; from integration to separation. Moderate civil rights leaders and the movement’s white supremacist foes—for different reasons—opposed Black nationalist demands for separate institutions and self-determination writ large. To these groups, the Black Power ‘turn’ represented a reversal of progress made since the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Zoë Burkholder complicates this popular refrain in three important ways. First, she reminds us that there never was a unifying bridge. No progressive arc toward integration actually represented the movement’s trajectory. Its goals and tactics were always contested, and this was especially true when it came to public education. Secondly, her temporal scope (from 1840 to the present) demonstrates the fundamental problem with framing the Black Power movement as a sudden turn from integration. Instead, it epitomised an ongoing debate among Black educational activists about how best to transform the educational experiences of Black youth into a democratic system. By expanding the timeline, we see that the advocacy for integration or separation were not so clear-cut, for, at different periods, ‘activists on either side overlapped and intersected with one another’ (p. 12). We are also treated to a genealogy of Black educational debates that predate the well-documented rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Thirdly, Burkholder’s geographic focus on ‘the North’ builds on existing scholarship that challenges the existence and persistence of a Jim Crow North. Because segregation was not exclusively a southern phenomenon, neither were debates about how to challenge racial segregation and inequality in public school systems beyond Dixie. ‘The central finding’, Burkholder tells us, ‘is that either school integration or separation dominated the political discourse of northern Black educational activists during particular historical eras. During each period, a chorus of dissent, debate, and counter-narratives pushed Black communities to consider a fuller range of educational reform’ (p. 6).