On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television and learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She says that she vividly remembers a scene in which a white reporter pointed his microphone toward a local black leader and asked things like "When "our" leader [John F. Kennedy] was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control "your" people?" She then decided to combine a lesson that she had planned about Native Americans with a lesson that she had planned about Martin Luther King Jr. for February's Hero of the Month project. At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, Elliott says she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins."