CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Marshalltown Community School District Transportation Director and former East Marshall High School Principal Rex Kozak attended the Sundance Film Festival premiere of the documentary “Jane Elliott Against the World” about his former Riceville Elementary School teacher last week in Park City, Utah.

On April 5, 1968 — the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. — Rex Kozak was a third grade student at Riceville Elementary School in far northern Iowa when he learned a firsthand lesson about discrimination from his teacher, Jane Elliott, through what became known as the “Blue eyes/Brown eyes” experiment in an all-white classroom. For over half a century since, the experience has continued to have a profound impact on his life, and he was recently invited to Park City, Utah to attend the premiere of the new documentary “Jane Elliott Against the World” at the Sundance Film Festival and participate in a subsequent Q&A session with the audience.

Kozak, the former East Marshall High School principal who now serves as the transportation director for the Marshalltown Community School District (MCSD), recalled Elliott, now 92, as a “hard, demanding” teacher who was unapologetic about what she expected from her students. The classroom experiment, which granted superiority to brown-eyed students based solely on their eye color before later reversing it and granting the same privileges to blue-eyed students, was filmed the second time she performed it and became the 1970 documentary “The Eye of the Storm.”

“People in town were excited that it was gonna be shown on national TV, primetime, ABC, and I remember that whole day, everybody was all excited (that) the premiere was that night,” he said. “And afterwards, the town was not real happy. When Bill Moyer stands on the Main Street and says ‘a relatively poor community’ on national TV in primetime, and all of a sudden, you get people debating ‘Was (Elliott) using the kids?’ And so it was a time period of kind of awakening for everybody. For me personally, it began to shape the understanding you can accomplish if someone supports you. If someone supports you, you will find success.”

Since he graduated from Riceville High School in 1979, Kozak has appeared in numerous follow-up documentaries and books about discrimination, and he’s traveled to Los Angeles to film and worked with production companies as far away as Germany and the UK. The newest documentary, which premiered at Sundance last week, focuses specifically on Elliott’s life and the difficulties she endured after the experiment became a national phenomenon — it got so bad that her own mother disowned her.

“When you watch the film, her kids are very, very angry with her, and it comes across very clearly because they felt that she put the film and everything ahead of them,” Kozak said. “And so it’s really about her journey.”

“Jane Elliott Against the World” features commentary from the rapper Killer Mike and chronicles the eventful life of the educator whose work is often cited as the forerunner of modern-day diversity training. As a result of the publicity from the experiment, she ultimately moved out of Riceville — her hometown — even as she continued teaching there after her son was beaten up in school and her home was defaced with racist messages.

This year’s Sundance, the first since the death of founder Robert Redford and the last in Park City, Utah before a planned move to Boulder, Colo. next year, was the first film festival Kozak has ever attended, and he called the opportunity “well worth it.” The first three showings of “Jane Elliott Against the World” were all sellouts, and Kozak participated in a Q&A with the audience along with Elliott, who joined virtually.

Almost 58 years after Elliott first segregated her class based on eye color, the impact continues to reverberate in the lives of those students — perhaps none more so than Kozak, now an esteemed educator himself.

“As you got older, you began to understand more. She opened the door for you to accept that you can be successful no matter what anybody says about you, no matter what they are, and the idea that we’re all the same skin color,” he said. “There’s not white and black. We’re all a shade of brown. You all of a sudden quit looking at skin color (and) look at the individual and how you can help the individual. And being in education, the biggest help you can give them is an education and getting the roadblocks out of the way.”

And despite growing up in all-white Riceville, Kozak is now proud to work at one of the most diverse school districts in the state.

“Marshalltown is a wonderful community of diversity, and I think most of the people in the community appreciate that diversity. And we’ve got to grow and continue to enhance that diversity,” he said. “And the school district this fall did ‘All Means All.’ That fits right into what the Brown eyes/Blue eyes is all about. All means all. And as I sit back and reflect on everything and reflect on my journey, that’s really what it comes down to — engaging, helping and fostering growth. And Jane says many, many times ‘Are you gonna be silent, or are you gonna stand up and speak up?’ Do you need to be flamboyant about it? No. But you just need to be strong. When it comes to doing the right thing, you know what? It takes a lot of guts sometimes to stand up and do the right thing.”

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.