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We sit outside Elliott's home in a gated retirement community. She and her husband, Darald, bought the property 10 years ago to be close to their daughter, who lives in nearby Murrieta. For six months each year, the couple call Riverside County home. The rest of their time is spent in Iowa.
It is late October, five days before the United States elects its first black president, and Elliott is in a dither. Her Iowa absentee ballot in favor of Barack Obama was mailed in weeks ago, although she worries about what he's up against.
"Whatever a black person does, he has to do twice as good as a white person to be thought of as half as good," she says, her sharp voice rising.
Dressed in a pink cotton shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes, Elliott is the picture of a grandmotherly retiree, but her voice remains that of a stern teacher. Obama "mustn't look angry because we have demonized black men," she says. "He knows exactly how to get accepted. He's a bargainer . . . and that's OK if that's what it takes to get white people to listen."
This is how Elliott has made a living. She retired from teaching 20 years ago and lectures a few times a month, primarily at colleges or companies in need of diversity training. She won't say how much she charges, but it's said to be about $7,000 -- higher if she's asked to conduct her famous exercise. The drill gives her a migraine, and she hates that she must be the proprietor of what she sees as a necessary evil, one that hasn't changed since she first enacted it on April 5, 1968.
With King shot just the day before in Memphis, Elliott encouraged her third-graders to discuss how something so horrible could happen.
"I finally said, 'Do you kids have any idea how it feels to be something other than white in this country?' "
The children shook their heads and said they wanted to learn, so Elliott set the rules. Blue-eyed children must use a cup to drink from the fountain. Blue-eyed children must leave late to lunch and to recess. Blue-eyed children were not to speak to brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children were troublemakers and slow learners.
Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.
