Black mother sues school district over cotton-picking project traumatizing her daughter: U.S. media

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- A Black mother filed a lawsuit last week against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest public school system in the United States, over an elementary school project that she says involved students picking cotton to learn about slavery, NBC News reported Wednesday.

In the lawsuit obtained by NBC News, Rashunda Pitts calls the project "culturally insensitive" and says her daughter has suffered extreme emotional distress as a result of the assignment, which Pitts says terrified her daughter.

Filed in L.A. Superior Court, the lawsuit alleges that LAUSD and Laurel Span School, the elementary school Pitts' daughter was attending that has since closed and been replaced by Laurel Cinematic Arts Creative Tech Magnet, humiliated her by having her participate in an Antebellum project. The project led to her child experiencing anxiety attacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, the suit says, according to the report.

Pitts says she first noticed her daughter showing signs of distress when she became "very quiet and reserved" for a two-week period in September 2017 when the project was underway, said the report.

About a month later, Pitts noticed a cotton field had been planted at her daughter's school while dropping her off and brought it to the attention of the associate principal. The associate principal explained that students in her daughter's class were reading an autobiography by Frederick Douglass in which Douglass discussed picking cotton, and the field was planted for students to have a "real life experience" of what it was like to be an enslaved person, the reported added, citing the suit.

Pitts says in the lawsuit she should have been informed about the "cotton-picking" project beforehand and that although her daughter did not have to pick any cotton, she suffered trauma while watching other children do so, said the report.

In a statement to NBC Los Angeles in October 2017, a spokesperson for LAUSD said school administrators immediately removed the cotton plant after becoming aware of Pitts' concerns, according to the report.