The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a $79,233 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a curriculum and digital education tools centered around Joe Jones’ 1935 mural, “The Struggle in the South.”
Now housed at UA Little Rock Downtown, Jones originally created his mural at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, in 1935. The mural, which is 44 feet by 9 feet, portrays the plight of ordinary Southerners in the 1930s, including striking miners, sharecropping families and African Americans facing violence.
The project, titled “Contextualizing the Struggle in the South: Place-Based Experiential Learning as a Path to Public Humanities,” will run until Dec. 31, 2026.
The project aims to examine and document the history of Arkansas and the South, focusing on the themes and issues captured in the mural. The grant team will collect archival documents and develop two courses — an Arkansas history course taught during the spring 2025 semester and a public history course taught during the fall 2025 semester. Both classes will be open to all UA Little Rock students, who will create materials for the educational website tied to the project.
The project team will also create a website to map the mural-inspired history of Arkansas. The website, which will feature historical sources, will be available educators, researchers, historians and members of the public.
UA Little Rock purchased the mural in 1984. Conservation work began in 2010 when a portion of the piece was displayed in an exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Following renewed interest in the mural, UA Little Rock received three grants to complete restorative work on the piece, including $536,000 from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council.
The university placed the restored mural on permanent display at UA Little Rock Downtown in 2018, where it’s available for public viewing and group tours.
“The project centers on the history encapsulated in Jones’s mural, focusing mostly on Arkansas during the 1920s and 1930s,” Marta Cieslak, director of UA Little Rock Downtown and principal investigator on the grant, said in a press release. “Too many people in Arkansas don’t know the mural exists, and we’re happy to have this opportunity to make the mural more accessible to the public.”
Other investigators involved in the project include Danielle Afsordeh, community outreach archivist at CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies; Emily Housdan, programming and administrative assistant at UA Little Rock Downtown; Jess Porter, director of the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, who also serves as the project co-director; and James Ross, associate professor of history at UA Little Rock.
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