School cancels black history cotton-picking field trip

A private Catholic high school in Ohio is discontinuing an “immersive” class lesson aimed at recreating the experience of slavery, complete with spiritual music and picking genuine raw cotton.

In a letter to parents on Sunday, principal Mark Vollmer of Cardinal Mooney High School in Youngstown said the lesson presented during last Thursday’s African-American history class covered Southern agriculture prior to the Industrial Revolution.  Students listened to music from the period and watched a video of a firsthand account of slaves picking cotton before going to a field themselves.

“Students were then provided the opportunity to actually feel, manipulate, and work the seeds out of genuine new cotton samples,” Vollmer wrote. “Study and then discussion ensued regarding the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the mechanization which took over the industry.”