Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon by Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper (review)

Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper’s Black Samson chronicles the dynamic and seasoned career of the Black Samson figure in United States history. Imagined from the physically endowed biblical character in the book of Judges, Black Samson has consistently appeared in American cultural life for almost two hundred years. This is a curious phenomenon, the authors note, because of the brevity of Samson’s story in the Bible. He is described as performing tremendous feats of physical strength against the Philistines, which leads to his enslavement; he is enticed by Delilah to reveal to her that his hair is the source of his strength; and he tears down the pillars of the Philistines’ temple, collapsing it onto himself and the thousands of others in attendance. Samson’s bodily characteristics are not mentioned in the Bible, besides a brief description of his hair and an allusion to the extraction of his eyes upon his capture. By the eighteenth century, European enslavers named captive Africans “Samson,” presumably to mark their enslavement and their bodily potential for agricultural labor. In ensuing years, the image of Black Samson took on a vigorous symbolic life, which Junior and Schipper carefully follow through literature, political culture, and mass media at key moments in the nation’s history—slavery and Reconstruction, early twentieth-century race riots, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and late twentieth- century popular culture.

Two other images from the biblical story tend to accompany Black Samson, albeit to varying degrees: the Philistines’ temple that Samson razes with his bare hands, and Delilah, the woman who seduces and then betrays Samson. Taken together, the three images form a symbolic arpeggio harmonically pulsing the stories the authors recount. For instance, in nineteenth-century literature, Black Samson tended to represent the immoral institution of slavery, which threatened the shaky foundations of the temple of the American nation. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 poem “The Warning” exemplifies this trend. Abolitionist in spirit, its verses imagined Black Samson as possessing the power to tear the nation to the ground. Other writers and orators drew from Longfellow’s lyrics, like Frederick Douglass in his 1852 address to the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” in which he analogized his invitation to celebrate America’s independence to Samson entertaining the Philistines at their temple.

Even as the Black Samson scenario depends on symbolic representations of Delilah and the Philistines’ temple, American popular culture tends to stress images of Black Samson’s masculinity. For instance, in the years leading up to the Civil War, Black writers envisioned Black Samson as a patriot who fought for America’s independence from the British, as an advocate for Protestant integrity against immigrant threats of Judaism and Catholicism, and as a devoted protector of his enslavers who were kidnapped by Natives. In the postbellum period, writers and clergy invoked Samson to describe antislavery militants, such as Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, and even non-Black ones, such as John Brown. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, Black Samson had moved more solidly into Black news media. Accounts of the 1917 St. Louis Riot and editorials about Black involvement in socialism and communism often invoked Black Samson. Black fiction writers, such as Jean Toomer, also seized the image to promote anticapitalist sentiments. In his short story “Box Seat,” from Cane (1923), Toomer used Black Samson to represent the Black working class taking down the temple of the Black professional class’s elitism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Black political activists, in a seeming return to trends in the immediate post–Civil War period, again associated Black Samson with militancy. However, in this era, Samson’s “blindness” was emphasized—not his physical blindness, but his metaphorical blindness to the risks of violent radicalism. Here, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., who were...