Land of (Unequal) Opportunity
This collection of images, broadsides, pamphlets, and publications documents the changing nature of civil rights in Arkansas from the territorial period through today. Browse or search through the items by keyword or topic. You may also save items to a personal favorites collection.
Arkansas has a long and remarkably complex civil rights history. While the 1957 Little Rock Central High School integration crisis is well known nationally and even internationally, it is merely one of a myriad of historical events that touches on civil rights.... More about the collection
The server “Scipio” is named in honor of Arkansas’s premier African American attorney, Scipio Africanus Jones (1863-1943) of Little Rock. Born a slave in southwest Arkansas during the Civil War, Jones moved to Little Rock after getting a rudimentary education. He later pursued college coursework in Little Rock, and he became a lawyer in 1889. For the next six decades Jones was the leading black lawyer in Arkansas, his most famous case being the exoneration of twelve men unjustly sentenced to death in the aftermath of the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.
Read more about Scipio Jones on the Arkansas Black Lawyers site.
The Land of (Unequal) Opportunity project was funded in part by the
Arkansas Humanities Council and the Department of Arkansas Heritage.
