The principal at an elementary school in Washington D.C. sent a letter of apology home to the parents of all its students after a racially-charged and totally inappropriate incident.

According to CNN, Black fifth-graders at D.C’s Lafayette Elementary School were required to portray the role of slaves, which was part of a history lesson about America’s Civil War and Reconstruction Era. The fifth-graders were assigned the task of dividing themselves up into groups as prescribed by their “teaching teams” after the students read an article called “A Nation Divided.”

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“The teaching team had students further engage with the material by having them either put on a dramatic reading, create a living picture or create a podcast in small groups, according to a separate letter addressed to families of fifth-graders from the school’s fifth-grade teaching team,” reads a portion of the CNN report, which further explains the assignment.

To reenact these “living pictures” created by some of the groups of students, Caucasian fifth-graders asked their Black peers to portray the role of slaves during these group projects. This was assigned for the history lesson. Two days before Christmas of 2019, Lafayette’s principal, Carrie Broquard, sent a letter home with all students to their parents describing the disgraceful incident at her school.

Source: DC Students Forced to Portray Slaves for History Lesson, Principal Apologizes