Jane Elliott
| Jane Elliott | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 27, 1933 Riceville, Iowa, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Anti-racism activist, diversity educator |
| Years active | 1968–present |
| Known for | "Blue eyes–Brown eyes" exercise |
| Spouse(s) | Darald Elliott (m. 1955; d. 2013) |
| Children | 4 |
Jane Elliott (née Jennison; born May 27, 1933) is an American former third-grade schoolteacher, anti-racism activist, and educator, as well as a feminist and an LGBT activist. She is known for her "Blue eyes–Brown eyes" exercise. She first conducted her famous exercise for her class the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. When her local newspaper published compositions that the children had written about the experience, the reactions (both positive and negative) formed the basis for her career as a public speaker against discrimination. Elliott's classroom exercise was filmed the third time she held it with her 1970 third-graders to become The Eye of the Storm. This in turn inspired a retrospective that reunited the 1970 class members with their teacher fifteen years later in A Class Divided. After leaving her school, Elliott became a diversity educator full-time. She still holds the exercise and gives lectures about its effects all over the U.S. and in several locations overseas.
Elliott was born in 1933 to Lloyd and Margaret (Benson) Jennison on her family's farm in or near Riceville, Iowa. Her father, who delivered her, was Irish-American. She was the fourth of several children.
In 1952, after graduating from high school, Elliott attended the Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), where she attained an emergency elementary teaching certificate in five quarters. In 1953, she began her teaching career in a one-room school in Randall.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television and learned of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. She says that she vividly remembers a scene in which a white reporter pointed his microphone toward a local black leader and asked, "When our leader [John F. Kennedy] was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?" Shocked that a reporter could feel that Kennedy was a "white people's leader", she then decided to combine a lesson that she had planned about Native Americans with a lesson that she had planned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for February's Hero of the Month project. At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins.(sic)" She wanted to give her small-town, all-white students the experience of walking in a "colored child's moccasins for a day."
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