Becoming: Richard Wright and the Wpa (Works Progress Administration ) (Essay)

THE NATIONAL, international, and transnational spaces ever apparent in Richard Wright's search for a space to be a black man in the twentieth century are touchstones for the consideration of the intersection between race and place manifested in the power struggle Wright undertook as he sought to create a mature, masculine subjectivity in times both of decreasing economic and class resources and of challenging social and regional locations. Such environments functioned to diminish the possibilities for individual self-awareness, racial actualization, and social agency. The physical and psychological space associated with the South-North axis and with the liberatory Northern migration is usually considered central to Wright's development as a writer. However, one aspect of his early years in Chicago has received noticeably less attention. Wright's own drive to find a space not simply for an expressive black masculinity but for becoming a modern writer finds a corresponding drive in the formation of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which fostered and employed writers during the Great Depression. The Writers' Project became a way for Wright and other black writers to imagine their own lives as professionals, as practitioners of a vocation, despite their dislocation from the South and dispersal throughout the national landscape and the foreign places more hospitable to racialized subjects. In the WPA, a long list of black writers, for example Wright, Margaret Walker, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Frank Yerby, Theodore Ward, Frank Marshall Davis, Arna Bontemps, and Sterling Brown, could imagine themselves as writers and develop their craft within a cadre of practicing professional writers. IN A SPEECH presented on June 2, 1939, Langston Hughes told the Third Annual Writers Congress: "It is hard for a Negro to become a professional writer. Magazine offices, daily newspapers, publishers' offices are tightly closed to us in America." (1) This assessment by the major black writer in America at the end of the 1930s came as no surprise to other black writers who, inspired by the cultural awakening of the New Negro Renaissance in the mid-1920s, had attempted to support themselves by writing. Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Hughes himself, and their compatriots soon had discovered not only that the "vogue" for racial materials was amazingly brief, but also that the opportunities for black employment in the world of letters were largely absent. The writers understood that their exclusion was due to racism; for example, in an effort to erase the difficulty of a black presence in a white office setting, Fauset offered an out for any publisher interested in hiring her: "if the question of color should come up I could of course work at home." (2)