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 often viewed as oppositional figures in their approaches to Black liberation, provided key examples: while X compared himself to Samson in his willingness to martyr himself in the destruction of the American temple, King associated Samson's blindness with being spiritually compromised by his desire for retributive justice. Black women writers of this era also embraced Black Samson, often including Delilah in their retellings. Carole Clemmons Gregory's 1974 poem “Love Letter,” for example, brought Delilah to the center of the Black Samson scenario by voicing a defense of her community to Samson.While most of Black Samson is devoted to the figure's appearance in fiction, poems, and print news media, Junior and Schipper impressively demonstrate the intertextual nature of Black Samson's presence in film, paintings, comic books, graphic novels, and television. In one strikingly compelling example, they peel away the layers of the figure's appearance in Richard Wright's short story “Fire and Cloud” (1938), tracing its origins to Blind Willie Johnson's 1927 song “If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down.”Any doubts I had about the prevalence of Black Samson in the American collective imagination were quickly dismissed when, by some strange stroke of serendipity, I came across another reference while preparing my review of Junior and Schipper's book. The first short story, “The Good News Is,” in Walter Mosely's newly published collection, The Awkward Black Man (2020), is told in the first-person voice of Samson Diehl, a financially prosperous and overweight Black man. As he begins to lose pounds unexpectedly, Diehl tragically discovers that he has cancer, which alters his relationships with each of his Delilahs—his ex-wife, his girlfriend, his lover, and his caretaker. The relationships weaken him of his wealth and leave him emotionally adrift. While I could more easily identify the Black Samson figure in “Good News” from reading Junior and Schipper's book, as well as consider it in relationship to previous representations of the icon, their study, I realized, still left me without a theoretical frame for understanding the necessity of Black Samson's enduring presence. Put another way, why is American culture so reliant on this particular figure to interpret the physical and psychic functions of Black masculinity?At the beginning of their monograph, Junior and Schipper claim that the Black Samson archetype provides an occasion to consider the meaning and politics of race in America, but I wonder how their project would have been enhanced by engaging more systematically with two literatures. First, the vast discourse on Black masculinity by Black gay male scholars such as Marcellous Blount, Roderick Ferguson, E. Patrick Johnson, and Marlon Ross. A review of this literature would have yielded more historical specificity about Black male sexualities and Black male performances of socioeconomic class and citizenship that would have rendered a clearer definition of the conditions under which Samson becomes assigned to Black masculinity.The second literature, comprised of studies conceived similarly to Junior and Schipper's history of Black Samson, addresses appropriations of biblical scripture about Black life. I am thinking here about works like J. Lee Greene's Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century (1996), Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (2000), and Vincent Wimbush's body of works on “scripturalization.” All of these texts use their data to speculate about the tenacity of their selected biblical images and narratives, and exactly what they signify about race, sexuality, politics, and nation.Black Samson, in addition to its convincing argument about the pervasiveness of the Black Samson figure, suggests an underexamined intersection between literatures on Black masculinity and biblical studies. Scholars of Africana religions will want to read the book, not only for its thick, textual descriptions of the Black Samson archetype, but for the future directions it signals in the interdisciplinary field of research on biblical narrations of Black life.