Another School District Sued for Not Protecting Black Students

A school district in Illinois is being sued by parents who allege a history of racial harassment. The lawsuit alleges that the district has failed to protect Black students from racial discrimination and harassment (Photo: United States Court House).By Aziah SiidThis article was originally published on& Word In Black.The tactile activity at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, began harmlessly enough. The teacher asked students to reach into a small box and describe what they felt.But at the end of the exercise, the teacher handed Ziploc bags filled with dirty cotton — the material inside the box, ostensibly part of a history lesson on slavery — to the only two Black children in the class.“It was dirty, like a dirty bag of cotton,” one of the children, Autumn Shelton, 13, said in an interview last week with ABC 7 Chicago. “She let us pick it or clean it for the rest of the class period.”For her mother, Candace Ward, the cotton was the last straw: she fired off an angry Facebook post about it that went viral, attaching a photo of the bag. She then sued the majority-white district in federal court for what she alleges is a...