5

The Samson Complex

His remembrance shall perish from the earth, and he shall have no name in the street.

—Job 18:17 (King James Version)

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Over the next several years, the NAACP sought to register African Americans in all-White schools. In September 1957, nine African American students enrolled in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Yet, despite the legislative progress that the NAACP made in the 1950s, their strategy was not without its detractors. Some critics viewed it as too accommodating to racist power structures and called for militant direct action regardless of the cost. A letter by a reader identified only as L. W. Collins published on June 26, 1959, in the African American newspaper Los Angeles Tribune exemplifies this critique.

The NAACP leaders seem to forget that there is no substitute for militancy in the struggle for freedom. Legal technicalities and hairsplitting pig-Latin cannot take the place of mass action inspired by a determination to sacrifice even life itself in the attainment of an objective. . . . Away forever, with non-resistance philosophy. It was meant for slaves, and will be embraced only by slaves. . . . We must be like blind Samson, willing to pull away the pillars of authority, and bring down the whole temple of greed and corruption that would hitch us to the treadmill of inferiority and degradation.¹

The letter uses “blind Samson” as a model for African American resistance that Collins understands as more radical than the NAACP’s legislative strategies. As campaigns for civil rights intensified over the next decade, interpretations of Samson’s climactic action in the Philistine temple would continue among parties calling for more militant approaches in the struggle against racial injustice. At the same time, this racially charged image sparked controversy among African American intellectuals and activists as some claimed that the younger activists had a “Samson complex” that would ultimately result in nothing but self-destruction. Disagreements between African American intellectuals and activists over strategies of resistance during the Civil Rights Era are evident in their different perspectives regarding the wisdom of Samson’s actions.

While the 1959 letter from Collins praises Samson’s determination to sacrifice life itself, Ralph Ellison, in a publication from 1960, points out that Samson also sacrifices potentially innocent lives when he destroys the temple. Although Ellison had not completed or given a title to his second novel at the time of his death in 1994, he began to publish excerpts from it in the early 1960s.² The substantial drafts that Ellison left behind indicate that the novel focuses on a fictional character named Alonzo Hickman. Hickman, an itinerant African American preacher, tries and fails to prevent the assassination of a race-baiting senator named Adam Sunraider, whose race is unspecified. Framed by conversations at the politician’s deathbed, the novel reveals that Hickman served as a ministerial mentor for the future politician, who was called “Bliss” as a child. After a long estrangement, Bliss surfaces in New England as Sunraider. One excerpt, written in the first person and published under the title “The Roof, the Steeple and the People,” involves a conversation between Bliss as a young man and his boyhood friend Body. During the conversation, Body, who refers to Bliss as “Rev,” raises difficult questions about the collateral damage during Samson’s destruction of the temple.

Say Rev, Body said.

Can’t you hear? I said do you remember in the Bible where it tells about Samson and it says he had him a boy to lead him up to the wall so he could shake the building down?

That’s right, I said.

Well answer me this, you think that little boy got killed?

Killed, I said, who killed him?

What I mean is, do you think old Samson forgot to tell that boy what he was fixing to do?

I cut my eyes over at Body. I didn’t like this idea. Once Daddy Hickman had said: Bliss, you must be a hero just like that little lad who led blind Samson to the wall, because a great many grown folks are blind and have to be led toward the light. . . . The question worried me and I pushed it away.³

Body’s question is troubling because the Bible mentions the boy in only one verse, which reads, “And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them” (Judges 16:26). The text does not indicate that the boy survived the temple’s collapse. Despite Bliss’s dismissal of this question, Body does not let it go. Later in the conversation, Body says, “I wanted to talk about Samson and you didn’t want to.” Bliss continues to dodge the question, replying, “Forget about Samson, man.”⁴ After Bliss accuses Body of lying about another matter, Body responds, “Listen, Bliss, a little while ago you wouldn’t tell me whether that boy who led Samson got killed or not, so now dont come preaching me no sermon.”⁵ In a portion of the novel not published during Ellison’s lifetime, Ellison elaborates on why Bliss is so troubled by Body’s questions about the lad’s fate. During an exchange with Bliss, Hickman explains how the slave trade stripped enslaved women and men of their identity.

Without personality, without names, Rev. Bliss, we were made into nobody and not even mister nobody either, just nobody. They left us without names. Without choice. Without the right to do or not to do, to be or not to be. . . .

You mean without faces and without eyes? We were eyeless like Samson in Gaza? Is that the way, Rev. Hickman?

Amen, Rev. Bliss, like baldheaded Samson before that nameless little lad like you came as the Good Book tells us and led him to the pillars whereupon the big house stood. Oh, you little black boys, and oh, you little brown girls, you’re going to shake the building down! And, then, oh, how you will build in the name of the Lord!

Yes, Reverend Bliss, we were eyeless like unhappy Samson among the Philistines—and worse.⁶

Prompted by Bliss, Hickman extends the comparison of African Americans to a blinded and bald Samson to include the important role played by the lad in bringing down the Philistine temple. The lad’s actions represent the leadership role that younger African Americans can play for their people. Although Hickman imagines the next generation building a new structure after the present edifice crumbles, Body’s question forces Bliss to confront the grim implications of this plan for “little black boys” and “little brown girls.” If the younger generation led Samson in shaking the building down, they may very well die when it collapses.

Despite Ellison’s innovative uses of Black Samson imagery, more militant associations with Samson continued. Nothing illustrates this as clearly as the controversial comments made in 1962 and 1963 by Malcolm X, who was a high-ranking minister in the Nation of Islam at the time. His comments connect the crash of Air France Flight 007 with the killing of Roland Stokes, a member of the Nation of Islam in Los Angeles. During a confrontation between Los Angeles police officers and members of the Nation of Islam in the early morning hours of April 27, 1962, officers shot Stokes in the back and killed him. Stokes’s death troubled Malcolm X deeply, but Elijah Mohammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam, instructed him not to retaliate or organize against the Los Angeles police department. Just over a month later, on June 3, Air France Flight 007 was scheduled to fly from Paris, France, to Atlanta, Georgia. Passengers on the chartered flight included over one hundred patrons of the Atlanta arts scene returning from a European tour sponsored by the Atlanta Arts Association. Malcolm X, who was in Los Angeles at the time, immediately connected the two seemingly unrelated events while speaking to a large audience.

I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened. As you know, we have been praying to Allah. We have been praying that He would in some way let us know that He has the power to execute justice upon the heads of those who are responsible for the lynching of Ronald Stokes on April 27. And I got a wire from God today, wait, all right, somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.⁷

Malcolm X’s statements were recorded and appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times a few days later. The next year, he elaborated on his comments during an interview with Louis Lomax, an acclaimed African American journalist whose 1959 series of television specials, The Hate That Hate Produced, brought national attention to the Nation of Islam. During the 1963 interview, Malcolm X explained the theological reasoning behind Elijah Muhammad’s call for racial separation rather than integration.⁸

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God now is about to establish a kingdom on this earth based on peace and brotherhood, and the white man is against brotherhood and the white man is against peace. . . . Since his own history makes him unqualified to be an inhabitant or a citizen in the kingdom of brotherhood, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God is about to eliminate that particular race from this earth. Since they are due for elimination we don’t want to be with them.⁹

Lomax followed up by asking Malcolm X if “the American white establishment will come to a bitter end, perhaps be destroyed?”¹⁰ His lengthy response to this question invokes a number of biblical images, including a comparison of the crash of Flight 007 with the destruction of the Philistine temple.

God is going to punish this wicked devil for his misdeeds toward black people. Just as plagues were visited on Pharaoh so will pestilences and disasters be visited on the white man. Why, it has already started: God has begun to send them heat when they expect cold; he sends them cold when they expect heat. . . . Not only that, God has started slapping their planes down from the sky. . . . When the plane fell, I said it was God’s way of letting his wrath be known. . . . What’s so wrong when a black man says his God will protect him from his white foe? If Jehovah can slay Philistines for the Jews, why can’t Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro.¹¹

Then, Lomax continued, “You spend much of your life getting on and off aircraft. Don’t you fear that you might just be aboard when God sees fit to slap down a jet and kill a few score white people?”¹² Malcolm X responded, “But if I am aboard one of these vessels, I will be happy to give my life to see some of those white devils die. Like Samson, I am ready to pull down the white man’s temple, knowing full well that I will be destroyed by the falling rubble.”¹³ This comparison imagines the White establishment as the Philistine temple of Dagon. Invoking a similar image as Collins’s 1959 letter in the Los Angeles Tribune, Malcolm X imagined himself as a Samson-like martyr willing to sacrifice his life for this divine cause. His use of the familiar comparison of the biblical hero with African Americans reinforces his interpretation of recent events as representing a divine plan.

In 1962 Martin Luther King, Jr. condemned Malcolm X’s initial comments about Flight 007 in statements that were also printed by the Los Angeles Times a week later. King said, “I knew many of the people who were killed. Many of them believed in progress. Some of them who lost their lives were to have attended a concert only last week at which Harry Belafonte sang. If the Muslim leader said that, I would certainly disagree with him.”¹⁴ King’s use of Samson imagery when addressing African American resistance to White supremacy contrasts sharply with Malcolm X’s reference to Samson. At some point between July 1962 and March 1963, King drafted a version of the sermon “Love in Action” for inclusion in a collection of sermons published as Strength to Love.¹⁵ “Love in Action” focuses on the nature of forgiveness and Jesus’s statement from the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). King’s sermon uses blindness as a negative metaphor to describe the human condition that Jesus’s prayer addresses. He explained that Jesus’s prayer from the cross “is an expression of Jesus’ awareness of man’s intellectual and spiritual blindness. ‘They know not what they do,’ said Jesus. Blindness was their trouble. Enlightenment was their need. We must recognize that Jesus was nailed to the cross not simply by sin but by blindness.”¹⁶

King contrasted Jesus’s prayer for divine forgiveness with two biblical examples of how the desire for revenge “blinds” humanity. The first example comes from the story of Samson’s death. King explained, “One can only see the greatness of this [Jesus’s] prayer by contrast. . . . Man is slow to forgive. We live by the philosophy that life is a matter of getting even and saving face. We genuflect before the altar of revenge. Samson, eyeless at Gaza, prays fervently for his enemies, but only for their utter destruction.”¹⁷ King’s reference to Samson’s dying prayer for revenge on the Philistines (Judges 16:28) touches on a theme developed throughout the biblical story of Samson.¹⁸ A blinded Samson serves as his example of humanity bowing at “the altar of revenge.” Although the biblical text does not use Samson’s blindness as a metaphor, King used stereotypes that associate blindness with ignorance to interpret Samson’s physical blindness as an indication that he was spiritually compromised. King did not make a direct comparison of this blinded Samson with African American resistance to racial oppression or any specific endorsement of violent revenge by an African American leader. This sermon was probably written before Malcolm X’s 1963 interview with Lomax in which Malcolm X refers to Samson’s violent death approvingly. Nevertheless, considering that King addressed slavery and racial segregation in the same sermon, it is very likely that King was alluding to the well-established tradition of Black Samson imagery and its use in calls for more violent responses to racial oppression.

For King’s second biblical example of revenge that he contrasted with Jesus’s prayer, he cited the legal principle of an eye for an eye.¹⁹ King countered the principle of revenge, which he suggested Samson followed, with an allusion to Jesus’s command from the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38–39). King referred to these verses when he wrote that Jesus “knew that the old eye for an eye philosophy would end up leaving everybody blind.” Instead of lifting up Samson as a heroic martyr for a divine cause and affirming the belief in an eye for any eye as Malcolm X did, King turned Samson’s death into an example of the consequences of the eye for an eye philosophy. It is a failed strategy which shows that only radical love can overcome evil. For King, Samson’s death served as a cautionary tale about what happens when, in his mind, we are “blinded” by the desire for revenge.

King’s nonviolent approach was derided by some of the younger more militant Black activists.²⁰ He engaged the growing Black Power movement directly in his final book before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.²¹ In his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King critiqued White liberals for overestimating racial progress made on the basis of recent legislative victories during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. After citing a survey indicating that 80 percent of White Americans still objected to miscegenation and 50 percent objected to integration in their neighborhoods, King wrote, “Most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from the premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even physiologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less obvious but in most respects to retain it.”²² Despite King’s analysis of the state of race relations in America, he did not believe the tactics and strategies espoused by the Black Power movement provided the answer. He concluded that the rejection of nonviolence and racial integration is ultimately self-defeating for African Americans.²³

A brief editorial by an unidentified author titled “Modern Day Samson,” which was broadcast on the radio station WDIX in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on August 2, 1967, misrepresented King’s position by conflating it with the positions of advocates of Black Power. Although Where Do We Go from Here does not contain any references or allusions to Samson, the editorial implies that King argues that African Americans will tear society down in Samson-like fashion if White America does not change. It claims, “Mr. King says that the white community must change itself, or—like Samson—the Negro will bring down the roof of Western civilization on their mutual heads.”²⁴

The editorial focuses on the survey that King cites in his book. In response, it concludes that King and advocates of Black Power seek to blame others rather than take responsibility for their own circumstances. For example, the editorial claims inaccurately that attitudes about miscegenation reflect the fact that African Americans have not made themselves into desirable candidates for marriage. Referencing the race-related riots in multiple cities across the United States in the summer of 1967, the editorial mischaracterizes King’s followers as “stone-age savages” who resort to violence in the face of antimiscegenation attitudes. The editorial compares this violence to Samson’s destruction of the temple, which is the tragic climax to a chain of events that began when Samson, an Israelite, attempted to marry an unnamed Philistine woman (Judges 14:1–15:8). The editorial declares, “Until Black Power and Martin Luther King Negroes understand that they must earn a desirability as marriage prospects, they are in the position of saying, if you don’t marry me I’ll kill you—which is what some white people do. Martin Luther King, Jr. displays the mind of a stone-age savage. It is stone-age savagery that moves the Negro to this ten-city riot. Samson brought down the temple on his own head—but the community prevailed.” The editorial implies that Samson died in vain. After he dies, the Philistines are still in power. Despite the large number of Philistines that Samson kills, the Israelites remain in conflict with them until well after his death.²⁵ In fact, the Israelites are still fighting the Philistines in 1 Samuel 17 when David kills Goliath. The editorial compares this situation to the 1967 “ten-city riot” that the author believes is nothing more than an exercise in African American self-destruction. It will not bring down the current political structure on anyone’s head other than those who provoke the riots.

In contrast to this editorial, others understood the 1967 riots as the emergence of a new brand of leadership in the struggle for racial justice that fits the particular historical moment. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., who later changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, was a fiery minster in Detroit in the late 1960s where he emerged as a leading figure in Black theology. At a time when biblical characters were often interpreted as White, Cleage’s sermons reinterpreted them as Black revolutionaries. In a 1967 sermon titled “No Halfway Revolution,” he recast Samson as a young, Black militant whose unconventional form of leadership was exactly what was needed at that moment. Cleage declared:

Normally people would have frowned on him. They would have called him a hoodlum. They wouldn’t have listed him in their religious scriptures as a “judge” of Israel. But during this particular time, he had what everyone wanted. He wasn’t afraid, he didn’t mind dying, he was emotional, he struck out against oppression. So everyone called him a judge of Israel. . . . [A] hundred years from today we may remember as heroes some of these very individuals we call hoodlums today, who are striking out for freedom.²⁶

Cleage saw similarities between those involved in the 1967 multi-city riots and Samson. History may one day remember those who violently resist racial oppression in the United States as heroes just as Samson was eventually remembered as a champion of his people. Rather than dismissing the violence as illogical acts of self-destruction, Cleage asserted that it could be understood as analogous to Samson’s resistance against his oppressors. He explained:

All over the country we have young men now who are aware of the problems, who are participating in a rebellion, who understand what the nature of the rebellion is. They fight one way here and another way some place else. . . . Sometimes you wonder, “What are they trying to do, what do they hope to accomplish?” Remember when Samson was in the Temple and the Philistines were all around, making fun of him, robbing him of his dignity. . . . You have to understand that indignation, anger, hatred, all of them stemming from systematic oppression, can develop to the point where an individual says, “I am willing to die if I can take a whole bunch of them with me.” That is what Samson said. I am not quoting from anybody in Detroit or Newark. That is in the Bible. “Let me die with the Philistines.”²⁷

For Cleage, the multi-city riots were not random acts of violence. Rather, they were an understandable response to systematic oppression by those who had a full grasp of the nature of racial problems in the United States.

Some interpretations of the 1967 riots hearken back to Longfellow’s warning to antebellum America in 1842. The August 18, 1967, issue of Life magazine published a letter to the editor regarding the six-day riots in Newark, New Jersey, that took place on July 12–17, 1967. In this letter, a woman identified only as Grace H. McPherson from Globe, Arizona, expressed her concern over yet another outbreak of race-related violence. She alluded to the race-related civil unrest in the Watts section of Los Angeles on August 11–17, 1965. For McPherson, the Newark riots were a “new Watts.” Her entire letter reads:

Every time I read about a new “Watts” I think of these lines from Longfellow’s “The Warning” written over a hundred years ago:

. . . There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, Till the vast Temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.²⁸

As we discussed in chapter 1, although Longfellow’s poem was originally composed in support of the anti-slavery movement, its warning was applied to many other social injustices facing African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. McPherson’s letter continues this tradition by extending the warning into the 1960s. She regarded the urban unrest as a result of America’s failure to heed Longfellow’s warning. Although slavery had been legally abolished over one hundred years earlier, African Americans remain Samson-like prisoners in the American temple of liberty. McPherson understood the uprisings in Watts and Newark as evidence that oppressed African Americans were beginning to shake the pillars of American society just as Longfellow warned.

A few months later, one of America’s most prominent White clergy also interpreted the 1967 uprisings as a harbinger of things to come by using the image of Samson resting his hands upon the pillars of the Philistine temple. In early 1968, the Atlanta Daily World, an African American newspaper, carried a brief article on a speech delivered by the Reverend Franklin Clark Fry, the president of the Lutheran Church of America and one of the most influential Lutheran clergy in the United States during the twentieth century. Speaking to a group of fellow White Lutheran clergy in Cincinnati, Ohio, Fry called upon his church to recognize the gravity of the current situation.

Unstop your ears and be startled. What is commonly called the “racial crisis”—until to some, I fear, it sounds hackneyed, is real. The grievances fomenting it are just. . . . Frighteningly outspoken Negro people are more and more expressing their willingness to die for what they believe is right, and they are not unwilling to have others die with them. . . . You understand, I am speaking sympathetically of these people. If there is an explosive uprising, the heaviest responsibility will rest on white society which did not act when there was still a chance. We must find a way to deal with the problem of racism in our white neighborhoods and churches.²⁹

Although Fry did not refer to Longfellow’s poem directly, he compared the willingness of what he calls “frighteningly outspoken Negro people” to die while taking others with them to Samson’s willingness to die among the Philistines in the temple of Dagon (Judges 16:30). Fry continued, “The present situation is comparable to Samson when he destroyed the Temple of Dagon and himself along with it. Like him, many black brothers, blind with rage, have their hands posed on the temple pillars, ready to start pushing.”³⁰ Whereas Longfellow’s “poor, blind Samson” offered a sentimentalized view of the enslaved African American as worthy of our pity, Fry’s Samson is “blind with rage.” For Fry, the image of blindness did not draw attention to Samson’s pitiful state but to the extent of his very justified rage. To reinforce the urgency of the “racial crisis,” he compared the present moment to the moment when Samson rests his hands on the pillars of the temple. If White America continues to ignore the crisis, just as the Philistines seemed to ignore that Samson’s hair grew back while he was their captive (Judges 16:22), it is moments away from having its social structure collapse. Fry used Samson imagery to warn White America that it must address racism in its communities directly and immediately. The association of Samson’s destruction of the Philistine temple with more militant approaches in the struggle against racial injustice had reached mainstream White America.

At the same time, some African American artists and activists were suspicious of African American intellectuals who worked closely with White liberal elites. In their view, if Black Samson were a true revolutionary, he would need to tear down the current temples completely and build a new temple of his own. In 1968, Larry Neal, a poet, playwright, and professor, and LeRoi Jones, a poet and literary editor who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing.³¹ This extensive collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama was one of the most influential works to emerge from the early years of what became known as the Black Arts movement—a movement that created a place for the arts within the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.³² In his influential 1968 article “The Black Arts Movement,” Neal explained, “This movement is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. . . . The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self determination and nationhood.”³³ The close relationship of the movement to Black Power is readily apparent. For example, Jones and Neal reprinted in Black Fire the 1966 essay “Toward Black Liberation” by Stokely Carmichael, a leading voice in the Black Power movement who was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when the essay was written but later joined the Black Panther Party.³⁴ In language similar to Neal’s later article, “The Black Arts Movement,” Carmichael declared that Black Power involves the “struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to society, and to have these terms recognized.”³⁵ The radical politics of the Black Arts movement contrasted sharply with those of civil rights leaders, such as King, who advocated nonviolent protest and supported racial integration.

A number of works in Black Fire discuss Malcolm X, his death, and his legacy. Welton Smith, a Houston-born poet and playwright, eulogized the fallen icon in one of the most memorable works on Malcolm X to come out of the Black Arts movement. Smith captures the anger, pain, and grief of the moment in a poem simply titled “malcolm.” He divides the poem into two parts. The first part has four sections: “malcolm,” “The Nigga Section,” “interlude,” and “Special Section for the Niggas on the Lower East Side or: Invert the Devisor and Multiple.” The second part has two sections: “interlude” and “The Beast Section.” Smith uses misogynistic and derogatory references to homosexual acts among other extremely graphic images of sexual violence to lash out against various parties that he views as responsible for Malcolm X’s death. Smith does not direct his anger only toward the men who shot Malcolm X. For example, the section titled “Special Section for the Niggas on the Lower East Side or: Invert the Devisor and Multiple” targets African American intellectuals who, in Smith’s opinion, undermined Malcolm X’s revolutionary cause by ingratiating themselves to White liberals. At one point, he evoked Black Samson imagery to critique the alleged hollowness of their commitment to the cause of African American freedom.

you are jive revolutionaries

who will never tear this house down

you are too terrified of cold

too lazy to build another house.³⁶

For Smith, African American intellectuals’ talk of revolution is largely empty rhetoric. He contended that a meaningful commitment to African American self-determination would require tearing down the house built on a foundation of White liberal politics and building another house by and for African Americans. From Smith’s perspective, these lazy intellectuals would rather stay in the comfortable house of White liberal politics than fully commit to the revolutionary cause of self-determination and governance. The line “who will never tear this house down” does not come from the biblical Samson story. Instead, it seems to allude to the song about Samson that we discussed in chapter 4 popularized under the title “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” by the preacher and blues musician known as Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. Over the years, the song had been used to express revolutionary political positions by influential African American artists and intellectuals such as Richard Wright.³⁷ Smith invokes the song’s version of the Samson story to expose the African American intellectual of his day as nothing like the biblical hero. In Smith’s opinion, the contemporary intellectual is no Samson and will never tear this house down.

While the Black Arts movement began in Harlem, another influential expression of Black Power was emerging on the other side of the country. In October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, Newton explained the party’s initial goal of using armed but legal patrols to monitor police activity in their neighborhoods.

[The Party] would be based upon defending the community against the aggression of the power structure, including the military and the armed might of the police. We informed the brothers of their right to possess weapons. . . . Many community people could not believe at first that we had only their interest at heart. Nobody had ever given them any support or assistance when the police harassed them, but here we were, proud Black men, armed with guns and a knowledge of the law.³⁸

The Black Panther Party was founded on a ten-point program. The first point reflects its overall political agenda. It reads, “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”³⁹ The other nine points flesh out what this freedom and self-determination would require, including reforms in employment, education, housing, and current economic, military, criminal justice, and police practices.⁴⁰ Newton’s childhood heroes included the biblical Samson with King David as a close second.

Both my parents are deeply religious, and when Melvin [Huey’s brother] and I were small, my father often read to us from the Bible. My favorite was the Samson story, followed closely by David and Goliath. I must have heard those stories a thousand times. Samson’s strength was impressive, as well as his wisdom and his ability to solve riddles put to him. . . . I liked David and Goliath because, despite Goliath’s strength and power, David was able to use strategy and eventually gain the victory. Even then, the story of David seemed directed to me and to my people.⁴¹

Newton was impressed by Samson and David because they each possessed not only impressive strength but also wisdom. For Newton, Samson was not a reckless, destructive, force acting out of rage without regard for the consequences of his violent actions. The biblical hero displayed a formidable intellect by using riddles to engage his opponents.⁴² Although some used the Samson figure to question the prudency of militant actions coming from the Black Power movement, Newton embraced Samson as a model of the strategic militancy necessary to achieve the goals of the party’s ten-point plan.

By 1968, the Black Panthers had chapters in cities across the nation, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Newark, among others. As the party grew, local and federal law enforcement increased its surveillance and harassment of the group. For example, on August 6, 1969, the Black Panthers held a rally in New Haven, Connecticut, that attracted members from Boston and New York City. Douglas Miranda, the defense captain for the Boston chapter of the party, was in attendance. According to an article in the Black Panther newspaper, Miranda and other Panthers traveling with him back to Boston were arrested because the car they were driving was allegedly rented on a stolen credit card.⁴³ All of the Panthers except one were bailed out of jail. Nevertheless, according to the article, they were not bailed out “before the sadistic fascist pigs got their thing off by shaving the incarcerated brothers’ heads. The pigs, with their comic book mentality were probably caught up in the fable of Samson and thought they were sapping the brothers of their revolutionary strength. . . . Vamping on Panthers on such absurd and ridiculous pretense will not destroy the Black Panther Party and cutting off brothers’ naturals will definitely not sap them of their revolutionary strength.”⁴⁴

As the arrested Panthers wore their hair naturally as an intentional cultural expression, the police officers probably cut their hair to humiliate them and to demonstrate their cultural dominance and control over the Panthers in their custody. Yet, the article invokes the association of Samson with African American revolutionaries to reframe the haircuts as an indication of the officers’ naivety. It mocks the police officers for buying into the Black Samson mythology and, like their Philistine counterparts, believing that they could vanquish their enemies with a haircut. The police officers’ abuse of the arrested Panthers would not dissuade their commitment to the revolutionary cause any more than Samson’s haircut had stopped his actions against the Philistines.

Neither Newton’s autobiography nor the article in the Black Panther newspaper alludes to Samson’s fatal destruction of the Philistine temple. Nevertheless, some African American intellectuals continued to focus on Samson’s self-destruction to characterize younger activists involved in the Black Power movement as reckless and illogical. John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was a distinguished anthropologist and sociologist who founded the African American studies program at Stanford University. He epitomized this attitude toward younger activists in comments made during what became known as the “Haverford Discussions.”

Beginning in 1969, Kenneth B. Clark led a series of meetings at Haverford College, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania. Clark, a psychologist, is probably best known for the experiments he developed with his wife and fellow psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark based on her work using dolls to study children’s understandings of race. Their research was used in Brown v. Board of Education to show the harmful effects of segregation on children. Clark brought together a number of prominent African American academics and intellectuals who supported racial integration to formulate a response to the growing Black Power movement and those advocating anti-integration positions. In addition to Drake and Clark, the participants included, among others, Ralph Ellison; Adelaide McGuinn Cromwell, a professor of sociology and co-founder of the African studies program at Boston University; Robert C. Weaver, who was the secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the first African American to hold a cabinet position; William Henry Hastie, Jr., a federal appellate judge who President Kennedy considered nominating as a Supreme Court justice; and John Hope Franklin, an acclaimed historian at the University of Chicago who would become a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.

In general, the group was dismissive of the younger, more militant activists. For example, during the initial meetings on May 30, 1969, Drake singled out H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. Brown was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he briefly served as minister of justice for the Black Panthers. Following the 1968 uprising in Detroit in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Brown wrote, “There was a town called Motown; now it ain’t no town. They used to call it Detroit, now they call it Destroyed. I hear ain’t nothing left but Motown sound. And if they don’t come around, you gon’ burn them down.”⁴⁵ According to Drake, Brown had a “Samson complex” that Drake thought was common among younger, more militant activists. He viewed Brown as epitomizing a dangerous, self-destructive attitude that he compared to Samson’s death in the Philistine temple.

[This is] what I call a Rap Brown Synonym. I used to call it the Samson complex. You may recall that after Samson’s hair grew back out, when he got his strength back, the Philistines brought him to make sport of him. . . . He was blinded. And as Milton said, “Samson Agonistes, eyeless in Gaza, grinding at the mill with slaves.” He has to know his place. They brought him to the hall and he said: “Where are the pillars?” And when he got them, he pulled them down, see, and Samson died. But while he was dying, he was probably saying, “Man, look at all these Philistines dying! Just look at them, see!” I call this the Samson Complex, or the Rap Brown complex. . . . I think we just have to write off that proportion of these people who feel this way. Isn’t any use trying to talk to these fellows.⁴⁶

Although Newton had praised Samson for his wisdom rather than the manner in which he died, Drake used the story of Samson’s death to characterize Brown and like-minded revolutionaries as unreasonable. He dismissed those who held this extreme position as not worth debating. Yet, this dismissive attitude prevented the Haverford group from providing a robust response. Their plans to publish an intellectually rigorous rebuttal did not materialize.⁴⁷ In fact, the transcripts of the Haverford Discussions were not published until 2013.⁴⁸ As the political climate on Haverford’s campus shifted under the influence of Black Power, the group left the campus, changed its named to the Hastie Group after William Hastie, and held its final meeting in New York City in 1975. The final meeting was not transcribed.

The 1960s ended without a clear resolution between the deep differences in opinions over how to confront racial injustice. The use of Samson imagery signaled the growing fault lines among African American leaders throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s regarding how to achieve meaningful racial justice. Some imagined Samson as a model of militant resistance even at the cost of one’s life. Others interpreted his death as a cautionary tale about the end results of imprudent reactionary strategies. In 1963, James Baldwin, the acclaimed writer and social critic, published his landmark memoir, The Fire Next Time, which urgently warned that if America did not address its “racial nightmare” it was headed full steam toward an apocalypse. He concluded this book with a haunting claim. He wrote, “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”⁴⁹ The increasing race-related violence, uprisings, and assassinations throughout the 1960s made The Fire Next Time seem prophetic nine years later when Baldwin published a second memoir, No Name in the Street, in 1972.⁵⁰ America had not heeded his earlier warning and had crossed a point of no return. Whereas Baldwin’s 1963 book closes with a traditional song about the biblical flood story as a warning, his 1972 book opens with another traditional song about Samson’s destruction of the Philistine temple. One of the epigraphs at the beginning of No Name in the Street captures this despair over the present order of the world. It reads, “If I had-a- my way, I’d tear this building down. Great God, then, if I had-a- my way, little children, I’d tear this building down—Slave Song.”⁵¹

For Baldwin, the late 1960s demonstrated that the fire he warned of could no longer be prevented. The old world must collapse for a new one to emerge. In the epilogue of No Name in the Street, Baldwin wrote, “An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born.”⁵² Baldwin insisted that “we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn,” although he admits that “many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives.”⁵³ Over the next few decades, however, better skilled midwives for this new world would emerge through engagements with the Black Samson tradition in the writings of a new generation of African American women.