Virginia's first lady gave cotton to black students and asked them to imagine being enslaved

Virginian first lady Pamela Northam gave cotton to black students and asked them to imagine being enslaved during a tour of the governor's mansion — and one of the children's parents complained in a letter to lawmakers.

The Washington Post reported that Mrs. Northam, wife of embattled Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, made the offensive action last week in the midst of the controversy surrounding the governor's yearbook page featuring a person in blackface.

Leah Dozier Walker, the director of the Virginia Education Department's Office of Equity and Community Engagement, wrote to lawmakers and Northam's office describing the incident, which her eighth-grade daughter, a state Senate page, experienced on February 21.

"The Governor and Mrs. Northam have asked the residents of the Commonwealth to forgive them for their racially insensitive past actions,” Walker wrote in her February 25 letter. "But the actions of Mrs. Northam, just last week, do not lead me to believe that this Governor’s office has taken seriously the harm and hurt they have caused African Americans in Virginia or that they are deserving of our forgiveness."

The state employee's daughter was one of two African American students who were given balls of cotton and asked to imagine the slavery scenario by Mrs. Northam, the report noted.

It took place during a tour of the Executive Mansion, which, as the report noted, "was built with slave labor in 1813 and is the oldest active governor’s residence in the country."

Walker noted in her letter that Mrs. Northam asked three black state Senate pages — the only black people in the page program — "if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day."

She then asked the state employee's daughter and another black student to hold a ball of cotton. In a letter to the first lady, Walker's daughter wrote that she did not take the cotton ball but that her friend did — and that it made her "very uncomfortable."

“I will give you the benefit of the doubt, because you gave it to some other pages,” Walker's daughter wrote to Mrs. Northam. “But you followed this up by asking: ‘Can you imagine being an enslaved person, and having to pick this all day?’, which didn’t help the damage you had done.”

In a statement, the governor's office said the first lady "simply handed the cotton to whoever was nearby and wanted everyone to note the sharpness of the cotton ball, to imagine how uncomfortable it would’ve been to handle all day."

“I regret that I have upset anyone,” Mrs. Northam said in the statement made through the governor's spokesperson Ofirah Yheskel.

Northam's office noted that the first lady has been learning about the history of the enslaved workers who built Monticello, is "committed to chronicling the important history of the Historic Kitchen, and will continue to engage historians and experts on the best way to do so in the future."

The Post noted that the Virginia first lady has been considered one of the strongest behind-the-scenes advocates for Northam to weather the storm and rebuff calls for resignation amid the blackface scandal.