"On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, I––one of my students came into the room and said they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott, why'd they shoot that king? I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talking about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa. ...
I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used. So the next day I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color. And immediately created a microcosm of society in a third–grade classroom."
(Jane Elliott, 1985, PBS)
Frontline "A Class Divided": Season 3, Episode 9, A Class Divided (26 Mar. 1985), Director: William Peters, Writers: Charlie Cobb, William Peters.
