Effective history teaching includes ample opportunities for students to develop historical thinking skills and habits of mind which encourage them to learn content beyond simple acquisition of facts. Covering the profound topic of segregation by employing multiple perspectives and encouraging investigation beyond the traditional narrative provides students with opportunities to examine and evaluate issues and events surrounding segregation, and, consequently, the process of integration, at a level that generates meaningful learning. Teachers covering this topic facilitate critical analysis of sources in an effort to develop a more nuanced and reflexive view of the segregation experience inclusive of the perspectives of African Americans and the social relevance of past and ongoing racial struggles in America. What appears to be missing--specifically in textbooks--is the story of the African American experience surrounding the realities of education in segregated and integrated schools which, the authors argue, can serve as an engaging entre into the broader realities of segregation as part of American history. They assert that advocating a more thoughtful inclusion of African American perspectives of education may provide a context that allows students the opportunity to examine complexities within the historical record and foster the development of historical habits of mind, eschewing a solely one-sided perspective that the policy of integration was the only means to provide effective education to African Americans. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to present an ethnographic historical study that includes personal narrative from three black citizens who experienced segregated America as students, initially in black-only schools, and later as members of integrated schools. Themes developed from these interviews were positioned alongside existing historiographical research of black-only schools in many areas of the United States to provide a deeper understanding of the African American narrative within segregated schools. The authors' intention is that the presentation of the participants' narratives serves to entice teachers and those interested in social justice in education to consider the education of blacks in segregated America as integral to a more complete picture of the realities of that time for African Americans living in communities where separate was surely not equal, but where the quality of education cannot unequivocally be depicted as inferior. (Contains 62 endnotes and 1 figure.)