Brian Mitchell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, is suing the school for what his attorney said is an ongoing pattern of discrimination.
Mitchell came to UALR in 2015 and earned tenure in July 2021. In court filings, Mitchell says he has been paid less than his white counterparts and evaluated more harshly, and that he’s suffered ongoing retaliation for complaining about it.
“Despite his accomplishments, as the only Black professor in UALR’s History Department, Dr. Mitchell has experienced a nearly continuous pattern of discriminatory interference with achieving access to fair terms, conditions, and opportunities for advancement while a full-time professor at UALR,” according to a press release from his attorney, Amelia LaFont.
From the release:
The lawsuit chronicles how UALR ignores discrimination complaints, dismisses them as misunderstandings, or retaliates against the victim. By filing this lawsuit, Dr. Mitchell has put UALR on notice that these acts will no longer be buried from public view.
“UALR has a very public face in regards to diversity and having a diverse faculty. And
then it has what’s happening privately,” Mitchell said. “What they don’t say is we’ve lost a tremendous amount of our faculty of color over issues like this. There are a number of people who have resigned or quit and not gotten tenure and left over these exact issues.”
There have been rumblings about grievances from Black and brown faculty members at UALR for a while now. And in a complaint Mitchell filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Mitchell said the campus police responded to an apparent misunderstanding about a paycheck.
Mitchell has been lauded widely, including in the Arkansas Times, for his work on an illustrated history of Louisiana’s first Black lieutenant governor and for his work in uncovering untold stories about the 1919 Elaine massacre.
We have reached out to UALR about the case and will update when we hear back.