On the night of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when a single shot from James Earl Ray's rifle ended his life.

King’s assassination sent shockwaves across the United States. The very next day, in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, the topic was brought up in Jane Elliott’s Grade 3 classroom.

Elliott was anxious to talk to her third graders about King's death, but when she heard them use racist remarks to discuss his work, she knew she had to intervene.

“I knew it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it,” Elliott would later tell ABC reporters.

Over the next few days, Elliott transformed her classroom into a social laboratory. She set up an experiment in which students were judged based on eye colour, with the goal of teaching them first hand about discrimination.

“If it makes good sense to judge people by the amount of melanin in their skin, it makes equally good sense to judge them by the amount of melanin in their eyes,” Elliott told the Straight over the phone.

Elliott’s experiment—now known as “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes”—changed the way her Grade 3 students understood prejudice. Its success was such that over the next 47 years, Elliott was asked to re-create the experiment around the world, teaching both children and adults about the effects of racism.

"Blue Eyes Brown Eyes" was made into a PBS special, and Elliott even made an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

But despite the experiment’s success, Elliott wishes she never had to do it again.

“Can you imagine having to deal with the same problem for 47 years?” asked the now 81-year-old retired teacher. “If people would stop doing it [being racist], then I could stop doing what I’m doing.”

The lively octogenarian continues to tour the world, raising awareness on LGBT issues, gender equality, and anti-racism. On May 23, she’ll be coming to Vancouver to give a talk called “The Anatomy of Prejudice” at John Oliver Secondary School.

Although the talk won’t include a reenactment of her famous experiment, Elliott will address some of the roots of prejudice.

“We don’t have racism, what we have is ignorance,” Elliott explains. “I refuse to allow people who say ugly things about others who are different from themselves blame it on the differences, instead of accepting responsibility for their own ignorance."

This trip to Vancouver won’t be Elliott’s first time working in Canada. In 2004, she performed her famous experiment with a group of 22 adults in Regina.

Throughout the experiment she saw how some white Canadians treated their First Nations counterparts, and reached the conclusion that “Canada isn’t so different from the United States.”

“The way the white people behaved during that exercise was absolutely unacceptable,” she said.

That experiment was turned into a DVD called Indecently Exposed, and a short clip of it can be found online.

As long as minorities around the world continue to be treated poorly, Elliott will continue to educate audiences on the nature of prejudice. Although she is hopeful for the future, current events push her to continue working.

“Every time something like Baltimore happens, and I see the way the media covers that, and then the Seattle demonstrations happen, and I see the different way the media covered that because its mostly white people, then I’m re-energized, because we are still here and we are still doing it.”

At the end of the day, Elliott believes that education and acceptance is the only way to make the world prejudice-free.

“It’s time for us to adjust our minds to the fact that we are members of the same race: the human race.”

Jane Elliott will speak at John Oliver Secondary School on May 23 at 6:00 pm. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door.