Black parent sues after Los Angeles school project had students pick cotton

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Los Angeles Unified, America’s second largest school district, is facing a civil rights lawsuit from a Black parent who says her daughter’s school taught students about slavery by having them pick cotton.

Rashunda Pitts sued the school district and staff members at Laurel Span school in response to the incident that, according to the lawsuit, humiliated her daughter and left the now 14-year-old with extreme emotional distress and anxiety.

The incident occurred in October 2017, according to the lawsuit, when Pitts spotted a cotton field at her daughter’s Hollywood school. She contacted school officials who informed her that her daughter’s class was reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and that the field had been planted to give the students “‘real life experience’ of what it was like to be a slave by ‘picking cotton’”, the lawsuit says.

After Pitts shared her concerns that the project was “culturally insensitive”, school officials agreed, according to the suit. School leaders said they would remove the field but that they couldn’t do so within 24 hours as Pitts had requested, and that they would aim to by the end of the week or the following.

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