Jane Elliott (born May 27, 1933, Riceville, Iowa) is an American former schoolteacher, recognized most prominently as an anti-racism activist and educator. She is also known as being a feminist and LGBT activist. Jane Elliott created the famous "blue-eyed/brown-eyed" exercise, first done with third grade school children in the 1960s, which later became the basis for her career in diversity training. The exercise was conducted the day following Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. The purpose of the exercise was to try to teach her students the effects of being a minority. Her exercise and the subsequent controversy became the basis for the television documentaries Eye of the Storm (1971) and A Class Divided (1985). Jane Elliott was also recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education among many other awards.
Jane Elliott gained attention in 1968 through the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, she taught her elementary class about racism in an exercise in which students were labeled as inferior or superior based solely on their eye color. The results were so infamously spectacular that she continued to conduct the same exercise, or variations thereof, for the next several decades.
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