A Black mom filed a lawsuit in state court last week against Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) over a project involving elementary school students picking cotton to learn about slavery.
Rashunda Pitts called the project culturally insensitive in the lawsuit that was obtained by NBC News. Pitts said her daughter had suffered extreme emotional distress due to the cotton-picking assignment. She added that the project terrified her daughter.
Pitts claims in the lawsuit that her daughter has uncontrollable anxiety attacks because of the assignment. She added that her child has also experienced bouts of depression when thinking about the project assigned in her elementary school.
Pitts files lawsuit in L.A. Superior Court
The lawsuit, filed at the L.A. Superior Court, alleges that LAUSD and Laurel Span School humiliated Pitt's daughter by having her participate in an Antebellum project. Laurel Span School was the elementary school the young girl was attending. That facility has since closed, replaced by Laurel Cinematic Arts Creative Tech Magnet.
According to the lawsuit, the assignment led to her daughter experiencing not only anxiety attacks but also other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Pitts said she first noticed her child showing signs of distress when she suddenly became very quiet and reserved during a two-week period in September 2017 when the project was assigned.
Pitts then noticed a cotton field had been planted at her daughter's school while dropping her off, according to the Los Angeles Times. She brought it to the associate principal's attention, who explained that students in her child's class were reading an autobiography by Frederick Douglass in which he discussed picking cotton.
Pitts claims her daughter suffered emotional trauma
The associate principal said that the field was planted for students to have a real-life experience of what it was like to be an enslaved person before. After hearing Pitts' concerns regarding the project, the associate principal offered to remove the cotton field by the end of that week or the next, deeming the assignment inappropriate.
Pitts said she should have been informed about the cotton-picking assignment beforehand. She claimed that although her child did not have to pick any cotton in that project, she still suffered trauma while watching other kids do so, according to Black Enterprise.
A spokesperson for LAUSD said in a statement in October 2017 that school administrators immediately removed the cotton plant after they became aware of Pitts' concerns. The spokesperson said at the time that they regretted an instructional activity in the garden at Laurel School was construed by some as culturally insensitive.
The spokesperson added that tending to the garden where a variety of vegetables, fruits, and other plants grow is a school-wide tradition that has been in place for years. The spokesperson said that it has never been used as a tool to reenact historical events.
