Greenwood's Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia offers a concise and well edited collection of materials for beginning researchers to identify the major issues and historical events about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The short single-volume set (338 pages), offers the brevity in its coverage that high school researchers and general interest readers will enjoy. The authors declare that the encyclopedia “was written for a wide audience, to include lay people, students, academics, and policymakers” (xvi), and the writing and contents are accessible and jargon-free but lack the depth that academics would desire. Editors F. Erik Brooks and Glenn L. Starks have both published works on the history of the U.S. Government and HBCUs and last collaborated on How Your Government Really Works: A Topical Encyclopedia of the Federal Government (Greenwood, 2008). The encyclopedia is arranged to provide a sequential history of HBCUs, divided in six major time periods such as “Reconstruction through 1899,” with each featuring a well-researched introductory essay providing the context of the development of HBCUs. One page entries on individual HBCUs are arranged according to the date they were founded, with twenty to thirty schools included in each section. This organization helps to contextualize the founding of the school, but there could be more about the unique history of individual HBCUs. The content for the entries on the individual HBCUs offers some information about academic strengths and institutional histories but are somewhat limited as “these histories were primarily obtained from each school's official website” (xvi). The reviewer checked institutional histories in the encyclopedia with the websites of fifteen HBCUs and found that the entries in the encyclopedia were very similar to the history pages on the colleges’ websites.

There are also sections with primary documents such as relevant legislation and laws and a list of websites and DVDs about HBCUs. The “Website and DVD Resources” section provides references to resources that are mostly general interest and does not have the depth of directories of other works on HBCUs. The “Notable Alumni” section, a major portion of the encyclopedia at sixty pages, provides a comprehensive list but is far too heavy on professional athletes, including many who were not major players. As a consequence, the strength of the alumni section loses its value as a browsable index of accomplishments of alumni.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia is an affordable addition to the surprisingly few books on HBCUs. Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Reference Handbook (ABC-Clio, 2003) is a recent title with mostly similar contents, without an in-depth alumni list, but does have a more comprehensive annotated directory of relevant organizations and sources. Although not a reference book, America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Narrative History by Bobby L. Lovett (Mercer University Press, 2011) is a well-researched and extremely readable history of HBCUs that is encyclopedic in its coverage and could serve as a more appropriate reference text for universities or colleges.

Although much of the content in Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia is freely available online, the aggregate context of both the short essays next to histories of the HBCUs presents the reader with all the information he or she would need to begin to understand the history of HBCUs. Recommended for public and school libraries.