School Under Fire After 'Slave Auction'

Parents at a New Jersey school are outraged after white students held a reenactment of a slave auction of a black child during class, the AP reports. A spokesperson for the South Orange Maplewood school district outside New York says the assignment was not authorized by the district. Spokesperson Suzanne Turner says a substitute teacher was in charge of the class at the time. She says the district is looking into training and improved supervisory protocols for substitute teachers.

The mock slave auction happened in the same district where students created posters for slave auctions as part of a curriculum about the colonial era. Superintendent John Ramos said at a board meeting Monday night that there was no intent to be demeaning in either assignment. (This has been a problem more than once in the past.)