Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes: The Experiment that Shocked the Nation And Turned a Town Against its Most Famous Daughter By Stephen G. Bloom
[email protected] On the evening of April 4, 1968, when schoolteacher Jane Elliott flipped on her television, she didn’t expect much. The pickings were slim that Thursday — Ironside or Bewitched. Instead, though, all Jane found were news bulletins — grainy black-and-white pictures of a motel terrace with metal latticework and a newscaster who said something about a shooting in Memphis. Jane got close to the set and stared. Someone had just killed Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a flurry of news reports from New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, then back to Memphis. A white reporter was sticking a microphone into the face of a black leader, tears streaming down his cheeks, and Jane remembers the reporter asking, “When our leader was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who’s going to control your people?” What was this “our leader” and “your people” nonsense? Hadn’t John F. Kennedy been the leader of black Americans, too? Didn’t white Americans share outrage at King’s death just as much as black Americans did? And, then, it happened — an epiphany, in Jane Elliott’s Riceville, Iowa, living room that evening, flipping between channels. Tomorrow in her third-grade classroom, she'd combine a lesson from the Indian Unit, when she held class in a tee-pee, with a lesson from February’s Hero of the Month, when her kids had studied Dr.