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This chapter offers an account of developments on the Kansas side of the border, focusing specifically on the rise of the Shawnee Mission School District. Johnson County became known for the high quality of its schools and attracted the greatest concentration of college-educated adults in the area. This came to represent a significant advantage with respect to the performance of local schools. The district encountered difficulties, however, in achieving consolidation, as wealthy patrons in fashionable communities rejected proposals to join with less-affluent residents in other parts of the area. An act of the legislature eventually forced creation of the district—the only one in the state to require this step. This episode reflected the effects of localism within the suburban context, where status distinctions between communities could make common interests difficult to recognize or acknowledge.

In the late nineteenth century after schooling in England, three sisters returned to their birthplace, Fuzhou, China to become CMS missionaries. They were the daughters of the “Fukien Moses,” Archdeacon J. R. Wolfe and his wife Mary, and cousins of the author’s maternal grandfather. Letters written by Minnie, Annie and Amy Wolfe to CMS Headquarters in London, for the first time, tell the story of the scope and nature of their interaction with Chinese women and girls in a significant cultural exchange. This particularly occurred through CMS schools, which, using Fujian dialects, provided grounding in Christianity, reading and writing. In addition, the sisters acknowledge their personal dependence upon, and valuing of Chinese Christian women with whom they worked. Born to evangelise, Annie once wrote “In spite of anxieties and disappointments this is the happiest work anyone could wish for.”

This chapter analyzes how bilingual education was institutionalized and contested in two very different Californian metropolises, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Los Angeles, home to California’s largest concentration of Latinos and to the biggest public school system west of the Rockies, faced the challenge of complying with Lau v. Nichols with special urgency. At the same time, the imperative to comply with the 1970 Crawford v. Los Angeles mandate to desegregate LA schools quickly showed how diverse and potentially at odds were the demands of a racially variegated population. San Francisco’s Latino population was far smaller and unique in California in that Mexican Americans comprised a minority. The city’s diverse community cultivated a surprisingly cosmopolitan pan-Latinismo around activism for bilingual education. At the close of the 1970s, the oft-repeated claim about the Lau decision—“ultimately [it] will set some kind of precedent”—indicated the ongoing uncertainty of its impact.

The author’s great-grandmother, Zhan Aimei, was born into a peasant family in rural Fujian and educated by British missionaries, becoming a Christian teacher, wife and mother. The trajectory of her life provides rare insight into the fruits of Anglican missionary work from a Chinese perspective. Zhan Aimei married a missionary-trained doctor, Lin Dao’an, and had ten children, the oldest of whom, Lin Buji, studied in the United States and became dean of Christ Church Cathedral and president of Trinity College Fuzhou. The author uses documents, interviews and missionary accounts to recreate the extraordinary life of an ordinary woman.

Working their way to Asheville, North Carolina to visit industrial schools, the Campbells had a cold, rough, and snowy trip to the mission school at Valle Crucis. From there, they headed toward Blowing Rock and stopped for the night at Linville, where they rode 5000 feet up to the craggy top of Grandfather Mountain with superb views all the way. After informative meetings in Asheville, full of information, the travellers headed home to Demorest, Georgia.