Jane Elliot's Experiment Summary

In 1969, the world lost Martin Luther King Jr., a pioneer in the fight for racial equality. This event started a discussion in Jane Elliot’s third grade classroom. The question, “Why would anyone want to murder Martin Luther King?” gave Elliot the idea of an experiment she could perform with third graders to better help them understand the problems of racial inequality. Elliot divided her students up by their eye colors of blue and brown. After the initial division of the students, Elliot told the class about each of their groups. Elliot told the blue-eyed group of children how smart they were, how good looking they were, and how much better they were than the brown-eyed children. Elliot told the brown eyed children that they were not as smart as …show more content…
The brown-eyed children started to believe that they were inferior to the blue-eyed children, and the blue-eyed children believed that they were superior to the brown-eyed children. Later, in the experiment, Elliot then changed the circumstances of the experiment. She changed the positions of power in the classroom, giving all the praise to the brown-eyed children, and all the derogatory remarks to the blue-eyed children. Like the previous experiment, the children reacted either positively or negatively about their assigned role in their society. Elliot then ended her experiment. She progressed with a lesson of acceptance and equality, even though someone has a different color of eyes, hair, or skin, that doesn’t mean they are of lesser value than you. So, to answer the question, ““Why would anyone want to murder Martin Luther King?” The answer is that we are taught to believe that someone who is not in the majority is of lesser importance than someone who is. We are shown through events in history, like the assassination of King, that those who have an unequal amount of power in society will try to stop anyone from taking it away from