Professor Ford will reflect on  the current crisis of education by revisiting 1930s Black radical thinkers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Katherine Dunham and Langston Hughes.  Drawing on Du Bois’s classic Black Reconstruction, he argues that  the dark proletariat’s underground pursuit of education begins reconstructing mainstream educational institutions. Likewise, a Langston Hughes poem, “New Day,” identifies the the title with the “flesh that triumphs (as well as the spirit),” probing the ethical relation between pedagogy, ecstatic poetry, and the political in its collective, contrarian stance towards America’s segregationist educational agenda.