Judged by its results, the current system for educating African American students in mathematics is a distinct failure. For years, educators either ignored this problem or simply blamed the failure of the system on its victims. In 1984 the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education drew national attention to the problem by devoting an entire issue to articles and reviews of available research on how America's ethnic minorities learn and perform in mathematics. For the present paper, 24 research studies reported since 1984 and involving African American students were reviewed, and several parent-, student-, and school-related factors that might influence performance and participation in mathematics were identified. Following up on that work, this paper reviews studies that have been done on this subject since 1984. Most were correlational studies. (Author/MKR)