The son of a woman who died of lung cancer is planning to sue a cigarette company for giving her free samples when she was a girl, contending that the giveaways were aimed at black children.

The lawsuit against the Lorillard Tobacco Company, maker of Newport cigarettes, is thought by legal experts to be the first to accuse a tobacco company of focusing on black children. It is to be filed Monday in Suffolk Superior Court, The Boston Globe reported Saturday.

In interviews with lawyers before she died in 2002 at 54, the woman, Marie Evans, said that as a child she got free sample packs of 4 to 10 Newport cigarettes from a company van that regularly came to the Boston housing project where she lived.

Ms. Evans estimated that she received free cigarettes 25 to 50 times, starting when she was 9, and traded them for candy until she was 13, when she started smoking.