Black Samson

Before Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King was identified with Moses, African Americans identified those who challenged racial oppression in America with Samson. In Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper tell the story of how this biblical character became an icon of African American literature. Along the way, Schipper and Junior introduce readers to a cast of historical characters-many of whom became Americanicons themselves-including Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and others. From stories of slave rebellions to the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights era and the Black Power movement, invoking the biblical character of Samson became a powerful way for African American intellectuals, activists, and artists to voice strategies and opinions about race relations in America. As this provocative book reveals, the story of Black Samson became the story of our nation's contested racial history.

readers walk away with a richer understanding of race in America ... Junior and Schipper help readers understand complex forces at work., A beautiful book, Black Samson is simultaneously specific and expansive, a fascinating and original contribution to scholarship at the intersections of American religious history and African American literary studies. Junior and Schipper persuasively demonstrate that the Samson myth has figured as a site for contesting race in many different communities across American history., This is an original and ingenious book. The fact that biblical characters such as Samson have played a large role in black politics of response in the United States is well-known. Yet there is a void in scholarship on biblical characters using African American informed hermeneutics. Black Samson fills that gap and goes a long way toward expanding the fields of biblical studies, American religion, and African American studies.

Dr. Nyasha Junior is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies from Princeton Theological Seminary. An award-winning author and expert on feminist, womanist, and African-American biblical interpretation, she writes for scholarly and general audiences at a variety of media outlets.Dr. Jeremy Schipper is a Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. He holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies from Princeton Theological Seminary. A prolific and critically acclaimed author, he has published widely on the use of the Bible in discussions of identity, including ethnicity, gender race, and disability, in ancient and contemporary contexts. He was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship for Denmark Vesey's Bible: Biblical Interpretationand the Trial that Changed a Nation.