Jane Elliott
Jane Elliott (born May 27, 1933, Riceville, Iowa, U.S.) is a former third-grade schoolteacher known for her "Blue eyes-Brown eyes" exercise she first held for her classroom the day after Martin Luther King was shot. When her local newspaper published compositions that the children wrote 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 and became 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 trainer full time and has been on Oprah and still holds the exercise and gives lectures about its effects all over the U.S. and in several locations overseas.