Los Angeles Black Mother Sues Daughter’s Elementary School Over Cotton Picking Project

A Black mother has filed a lawsuit against her child’s elementary school over an assignment that had students picking cotton.

Back in 2017, a teacher at S.W. at Laurel Cinematic Arts Creative Tech Magnet in Los Angeles created a cotton field in front of the school and made it an assignment for students to pick cotton. Her reason for creating the project was to get students “to identify with the real-life experience of African American slaves.”

In response, a Black mother named Rashunda Pitts filed a lawsuit against the school after seeing the cotton field when she dropped her 14-year-old daughter off at school.

When Pitts wasn’t able to discuss her concerns with the school’s principal, Amy Diaz, she spoke with assistant principal Brian Wisniewski, who tried to give an explanation for the offensive project.

He claimed that the class Pitts’s daughter is reading an autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and in the literature, “picking cotton was one of the experiences that he wrote about.” Pitts’s daughter wasn’t forced to perform the assignment, but she did have to watch her classmates.

“Completely incensed with the idea that the school would have her daughter and other children pick cotton as a school exercise to identify with the real-life experience of African-American slaves, Ms. Pitts expressed her disappointment and hurt in regards to the culturally insensitive and incompetent project,” the suit states.

Pitts called for the field to be removed within 24 hours, to which the principal replied, saying that Pitts’s deadline may not work and that the school would “aim for the end of the week or the following week, but couldn’t make any promises.”

Pitts is now suing the Los Angeles Unified School District and Board of Education, saying her child suffered emotional distress. In a statement, LAUSD reportedly called the project “discriminatory and harmful to the students.”