ABSTRACT
Effective classroom teaching is an intensely in-the-moment enterprise both made up and shared by the singular minds in any classroom. This chapter explains the origins of one of the historical echoes, and by doing so to amplify the resonance of prison higher education as a historically grounded reparative justice project. W. E. B. Du Bois understood what continues to be true: the inequality of black and white education mortars the unequal foundations for black and white life. Race, education, and the distribution of power are inextricably enmeshed. The recipients of college-in-prison programming benefits are people of all the races and ethnicities and classes represented inside US prisons. These benefits go disproportionately to those with slave ancestry only to the degree that those with slave ancestry have been disproportionately caught up in the near half-century rise of mass-scale incarceration—a history that stands on a continuum with the long history of US racial and class disenfranchisement.
