Margaret Walker and the WPA: Black Feminism, Progressive Government, and the Program Era

Abstract: Mark McGurl's The Program Era prioritizes the university-based creative writing program for the production of modern literature, but in the 1930s, the Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a progressive and antiracist rival. As a federal employee, Margaret Walker synthesized her colleagues' feedback into her classic poem "For My People," which extols Roosevelt's New Deal coalition. Although scholars focus on Walker's years at the University of Iowa, the WPA's folklore studies, directed by Sterling Brown and Benjamin Botkin, inspired the folklore poems of For My People as well as Walker's landmark novel Jubilee . Walker memorialized the Writers' Project in her underappreciated biography Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius , which not only makes a feminist critique of Native Son but also reminds us of the efficacy of government support for literary creativity. In the 1980s, Walker campaigned for Jesse Jackson, writing essays that drew on her skills as a WPA researcher to merge the ethos of the New Deal with that of the Rainbow Coalition. A testament to activist government coupled with national solidarity, her work models a class-conscious multiculturalism relevant for our own time.