DETROIT - The Graduate School at Wayne State University will host a lecture featuring Jane Elliott on September 21, 2011, from 6 to 8 p.m. in Community Arts Auditorium, 450 Reuther Mall. The lecture, titled "The Anatomy of Prejudice," is free and open to the public; registration is requested at specialevents.wayne.edu/2011jelliott.

In 1968, Elliott - then a teacher in Riceville, Iowa, a small, all-white town - divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups to give them a lesson in discrimination by treating the brown-eyed children better. The intent of the exercise was to illustrate the impact of race on American culture in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It was controversial and startling at the time, but it is now a famous exercise in exposing the experiences of being a minority.

Elliott, an internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is: an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. She first achieved notoriety in the 1980s when the PBS show Frontline ran the special "A Class Divided," which featured her third-grade class.

Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu/.