On a cool, crisp winter afternoon in a California desert, at the foot of the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered. Some were curious; more were angry. Before all of them, standing on an oil tank with a microphone and loudspeaker, forty-seven-year-old Joseph Y. Kurihara shouted angry words of defiance. Referring to the generally despised Fred Tayama, who was assaulted the night before, Kurihara bellowed, “Why permit that sneak to pollute the air we breathe? … Let's kill him and feed him to the roving coyotes! … If the Administration refuses to listen to our demand, let us proceed with him and exterminate all other informers in this camp.”

In 1787, a group of American refugee settlers in the western portion of Quebec, which would become the colony of Upper Canada in 1791, collectively petitioned the Governor General, Lord Dorchester, for schools. They insisted, in fact, on a relatively comprehensive network of schools funded directly through the government purse. Dorchester responded by appointing William Smith, the former Chief Justice of New York State with whom he had formed a political friendship during the American War of Independence, to head a special committee to report on the state of education throughout the entire province. Several hundred copies of the report were printed and released in 1789. The report recommended a government-supported tripartite elementary, secondary, and university school system. The recommendations were not acted upon, but the report's ideas lingered in public discourse for years to come. In the writing of the origins of schooling in Upper Canada, this report has not received considerable attention. Moreover, the intentions and goals of these early settlers advocating for government-aided schooling are characteristically overlooked. In the dominant view, the building of Upper Canada's school system was motivated by the bureaucratization and institutionalization concerns of major school advocates and politicians in the mid-nineteenth century.

No introductions were necessary. By the time of this meeting on May 2, 1972, all of the educators around the table had worked together in the tightly knit community of Protestant fundamentalist education for decades. Those close relationships, however, only made the meeting's confrontational agenda all the more awkward and tense. Beka Horton read the charges. Horton, with her husband Arlin, had founded a thriving fundamentalist school in Pensacola, Florida. The Hortons had invited Dayton Hobbs for support. Hobbs was, like the Hortons, a graduate of fundamentalist Bob Jones University (BJU) and founder of a fundamentalist school in Florida. The Hortons accused Walter Fremont and Phil Smith, leaders of the education faculty at BJU, of one of the most devastating charges in the world of fundamentalist education. They had called this meeting with Bob Jones III, current leader of BJU and grandson of the founder, in order to apprise him of their suspicions that Fremont and Smith had become progressive educators.