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27 years ago, when civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated,
A third grade teacher in Iowa uses a daring eye color experiment to teach her students about racism and discrimination following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
Key Takeaways
- Prejudice and discrimination can be taught and internalized quickly, even by young children.
- Experiential learning can be a powerful tool to foster empathy and understanding of racism.
- Racism is arbitrary and unjust, based on superficial differences like skin or eye color.
- Concrete, emotional lessons can be more effective than abstract discussions about social issues.
- The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. continues to inspire educational efforts against racism.
Summary
- The documentary follows Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
- Elliott creates a classroom experiment dividing students by eye color to simulate discrimination and prejudice.
- Blue-eyed students are initially told they are superior to brown-eyed students, receiving privileges and treating others unfairly.
- The brown-eyed students experience exclusion, teasing, and lowered self-esteem, mirroring real-world racism.
- The roles are reversed the next day to show the arbitrary and harmful nature of discrimination.
- The experiment reveals how quickly children adopt discriminatory behaviors when placed in a biased social structure.
- The film includes reflections from former students revisiting the experience years later.
- The lesson emphasizes empathy by making students feel the emotional impact of prejudice.
- The documentary highlights the challenge of explaining racism to children and the importance of concrete lessons.
- It critiques societal attitudes and media portrayals following King's assassination.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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grief and frustration erupted in America's cities.
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And far away in Iowa, one third grade teacher knew she had to do something.
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The shooting of Martin Luther King could not just be talked about and explained away.
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There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.
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I knew that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it.
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Because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.
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This is a fact.
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Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.
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It was a daring experiment in prejudice.
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I watched wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders.
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Can one teacher in one day change the lives of her students forever?
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Tonight, a class divided.
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August 1984.
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A high school reunion brings some 50 former students to Riceville, Iowa.
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11 of them, some with their spouses and children, arrive early for a special reunion with their former third grade teacher, Jane Elliott.
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14 years earlier, when they were students in her third grade classroom,
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ABC News filmed a two-day exercise for a documentary, The Eye of the Storm.
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Now, at their request, they will see that film again and relive the experience of her unique lesson in discrimination.
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This is a special week.
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Does anybody know what it is?
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National Brotherhood Week.
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National Brotherhood Week.
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What's brotherhood?
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Be kind to your brothers.
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Be kind to your brothers.
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Like you would like to be treated.
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Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated.
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Treat everyone as though he was your brother.
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And is there anyone in this United States that we do not treat as our brothers?
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Yes.
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Who?
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Black people.
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The black people.
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Who else?
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Indians.
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Absolutely, the Indians.
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And when you see, when many people see a black person or a yellow person or a red person,
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what do they think?
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Stupid.
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Look at that.
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Dumb people.
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And look at the dumb people.
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What else do they think sometimes?
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What kinds of things do they say about black people?
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Negroes.
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Negroes.
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In the city.
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Many places in the United States.
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How are black people treated?
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How are Indians treated?
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How are people who are of a different color than we are treated?
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They don't get anything of this world.
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Why is that?
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Because they're different color.
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You think you know how that would feel to be judged by the color of your skin?
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Yeah.
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I don't.
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Do you think you do?
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No, I don't think you would know how that felt unless you had been through it, would you?
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It might be interesting to judge people today by the color of their eyes.
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Would you like to try this?
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Yeah.
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Sounds like fun, doesn't it?
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Since I'm the teacher and I have blue eyes, I think maybe the blue-eyed people should be on top the first day.
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I mean the blue-eyed people are the better people in this room.
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Uh-uh.
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Oh, yes, they are.
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Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.
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My dad isn't that stupid.
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Is your dad brown-eyed?
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Yeah.
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One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you.
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He did.
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Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son?
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Yeah.
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My dad's blue-eyed.
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He's never kicked me.
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Brian's dad is blue-eyed.
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He's never kicked him.
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Rex's dad is blue-eyed.
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He's never kicked him.
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This is a fact.
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Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.
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Are you brown-eyed or blue-eyed?
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Blue.
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Why are you shaking your head?
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Are you sure that you're right?
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Why?
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What makes you so sure that you're right?
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The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess.
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While the brown-eyed people have to stay in.
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Hmm.
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The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountains.
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You'll have to use the paper cups.
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You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground.
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Because you are not as good as blue-eyed people.
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The brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars.
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So that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are.
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On page 127.
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127.
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Is everyone ready?
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Everyone but Laurie.
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Ready, Laurie?
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She's a brown-eyed.
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You'll begin to notice today that we spend a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people.
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Who goes first to lunch?
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The blue-eyed people.
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The blue-eyed people.
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No brown-eyed people go back for seconds.
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Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds, brown-eyed people do not.
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They're not smart.
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Is that the only reason?
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It might take too much.
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Okay, quietly now.
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It seems like when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us.
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The way they treated you, you felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything.
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It seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us.
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What happened at recess?
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Were two of you boys fighting?
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Yes, Russell and John were.
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What happened, John?
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Russell called me names and I hit him in the gut.
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What did he call you?
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Brown-eyes.
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He called you brown-eyes?
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They always call us that.
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They get all the blue-eyes.
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They keep calling us brown-eyes.
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They say, come here, brown-eyes.
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Then they were calling us blue-eyes.
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What's wrong with being called brown-eyes?
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It means that we're stupider.
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Well, not that, but that's just the same way as other people call black people Negroes.
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Is that the reason you hit him, John?
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Did it help?
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Did it stop him?
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Stopped Russell.
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Did it make you feel better inside?
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Did it make you feel better inside?
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Did it make you feel better to call him brown-eyes?
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Why do you suppose you call him brown-eyes?
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Because he is brown-eyes.
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Is that the only reason he didn't call him brown-eyes yesterday and he had brown-eyes yesterday?
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Because we decided it.
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Yeah, ever since you put those blue things on there, they tease them.
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Oh, is this teasing?
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No.
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Were you doing it for fun?
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To be funny or were you doing it to be mean?
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Mean.
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I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders in a space of 15 minutes.
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Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people.
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That wasn't true.
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I lied to you yesterday.
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The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.
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Russell, where are your glasses?
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I forgot them.
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You forgot them.
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And what color are your eyes?
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Blue.
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Susan Gender has brown eyes.
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She didn't forget her glasses.
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Russell Ring has blue eyes and what about his glasses?
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He forgot them.
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He forgot them.
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Yesterday we were visiting and Greg said, boy, I'd like to hit my little sister as hard as I can.
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That's fun.
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What does that tell you about blue-eyed people?
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They're naughty.
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They fight a lot.
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The brown-eyed people may take off their collars.
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And each of you may put your collar on a blue-eyed person.
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The brown-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess.
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You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time.
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You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people.
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Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.
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They're smarter than blue-eyed people.
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And if you don't believe it, look at Brian.
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On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, one of my students came into the room and said, they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott.
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Why did they shoot that king?
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I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.
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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.
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There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.
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As I listened to the white male commentators on TV the night before, I was hearing things like,
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who's going to hold your people together as they interviewed black leaders?
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Uh, what are they going to do?
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Who's going to control your people as though this was, these people were subhuman and someone was going to have to step in there and control them.
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They said things like when we lost our leader, his widow helped to hold us together.
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Who's going to hold them together?
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And the attitude was so arrogant and so condescending and so ungodly that I thought if white male adults react this way,
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what are my third graders going to do?
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How are they going to react to this thing?
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I was ironing the teepee, we studied an Indian unit, we made a teepee every year, the first year the students would make the teepee out of pieces of sheet, we'd sew it together.
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And the next year we'd decorate it with Indian symbols.
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I was ironing the previous year's teepee, getting it ready to be decorated the next day.
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And I thought of what we had done with the Indians, we haven't made much progress in these 200, 300 years.
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And I thought this is the time now to teach them really what the Sioux Indian prayer that says, oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins, really means.
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And for the next day, I knew that my children were going to walk in someone else's moccasins for a day.
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Like it or lump it, they were going to have to walk in someone else's moccasins.
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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.
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So the next day, I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color.
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And immediately created a microcosm of society in a third grade classroom.
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Riceville hasn't changed much in the 17 years since then.
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It's still a small farming community surrounded by cornfields.
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Its population is still under a thousand.
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And it's still all white and all Christian.
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And though Jane Elliott has continued to teach her lesson in discrimination, there's been little outward local reaction.
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No objections from school authorities or the parents of the 300 odd students who have by now been through it.
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The second year I did this exercise, I gave little spelling tests,
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math tests, reading tests, two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise and two weeks later.
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And almost without exception, the students' scores go up on the day they're on the top.
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Down on the day they're on the bottom.
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And then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after they've been through the exercise.
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We've sent some of those tests to Stanford University, to the psychology department.
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And they did a sort of an informal review of them.
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And they said that what's happening here is kids' academic ability is being changed in a 24-hour period.
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And that isn't possible.
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But it's happening.
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Something very strange is happening to these children because suddenly they're finding out how really great they are.
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And they are responding to what they know now they're able to do.
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And it has happened consistently with third graders.
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I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime.
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No, I don't want to see it used more widely.
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I want to see its the necessity for it wiped out.
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And I think if educators were determined that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise.
Topics:Jane ElliottA Class Dividedeye color experimentracism educationdiscriminationMartin Luther King Jr.third grade classroomprejudicePBS FRONTLINEsocial experiment
