By Rebecca O’Halloran

A third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa segregated her students according to eye color. The students with brown eyes had the privilege of going back up for seconds during lunchtime and they were able to play outside for recess. The blue-eyed students had to wear collars for the day, signifying their supposed inferiority. That was in 1968.

Thirty-six years later Jane Elliott is touring the world engaging students, professionals and prisoners in the same exercise.

Elliott visited the University yesterday, as part of the Brown v. Board of Education conference, to convey the importance of changing human behavior in regards to discrimination, while at the same time appreciating the cultural and physical differences in society.

“When white people change their behaviors, then people of color will change their behavior to white folks,” Elliott said. “Not until then will we reach attitudinal change.”

During her lecture, the 70-year-old brought two members of the audience on stage-one a black woman and the other a white 20-year-old male.

By asking the two volunteers various questions, Elliott was able to illustrate the frustrations of the black woman compared to that of the white male.

The black woman said she thought about her skin color everyday because of the situations she encounters, whereas the male said he never thinks about his color.

“This 20-year-old man never has to think about his color; this woman who is considerably older than he is and more accomplished and more educated and has more expertise has to think about her color everyday,” Elliott said. “Not because there’s something wrong with the color of her skin, but because there’s something very wrong with they way we traditionally-people in this country-think about skin color.”

Elliott said skin color is not a race, but in fact there is only one race: the human race.

Students were drawn to Elliott’s humor, but that did not keep junior Carolyn Concepcion from tears.

“I was crying throughout the whole thing-I was touched,” Concepcion, a public relations and sociology major, said. “The truth hurts-I guess it took her a lot of courage to do what she did.

While she was younger, Elliott saw black people suffering simply because of the melanin in their skin. She watched black children who had more courage, stamina, commitment and determination than anyone she ever knew take abuse.

Elliott first came up with the now infamous exercise in April 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

“I had no way to explain that to my students [why it happened],” Elliott said. “So I separated them according to eye color, just as Hitler separated people in Europe according to eye color during what has become known as the Holocaust.”

And then they started to learn about racism.

The first day of the exercise, Elliott told the students only people with brown eyes were smart and superior.

“I had seven dyslexic boys in my class that year, four of them were brown eyed,” she said. “On the day those brown eyed boys were on top [during] that exercise, they read words I knew they couldn’t read and they spelled words I knew they couldn’t spell.”

The next day, Elliott reversed the exercise and put the blue-eyed students on top. The result of the segregation was something she already knew.

“You can teach a child to be a racist,” Elliott said. “These kids had no negative feelings toward people who had different color eyes until I taught them to and about prejudice by watching me discriminate and being allowed to discriminate.”

Elliott did not consult any parents or administrators prior to doing the exercise. As Elliott saw it, black parents never had to go give their children’s teachers permission to discriminate against their black children.

In 1984, ABC came and filmed this lesson, which was dubbed “Eye of the Storm.” After the show aired, companies contacted Elliott and asked her to come and speak to executives. Elliott has since left teaching and continues to preach the importance of equality.

Elliott-who still lives in Iowa six months a year, 17 miles from where she conducted the exercise-is trying to get a book published, but no one wants to publish a book by a white author on racism

“White people think only people of color should talk about racism,” she said. “[White people] know the mechanics [of racism], we know how it works-how the power structure works.”

Elliott’s father was the one who taught her to be open-minded. When she started teaching the lesson of racism in the rural, Christian town, her parents’ restaurant lost business, her husband lost his life-long friends and her four children were antagonized.

Elliott said to this day she is known as the “nigger lover” in the town of Riceville.

“You need to hear how ugly [the word nigger] is so that the next time your tempted to say it you say to yourself ‘it’s not coming out of my mouth,'” Elliott said.

Since her father’s death, Elliott’s mother has ostracized her from the family because of her mission.

Elliott said if she understood the repercussions of her mission, she never would have done it.

“I will go to my grave knowing that I ruined my offsprings’ adolescence, [but] I’d rather be a lover than a hater any day.”