Black Samson by Jeremy Schipper
Author:Jeremy Schipper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00
7
Visual Representations of Black Samson
Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth.
—Judges 16:6 (King James Version)
In early 1860, on the brink of the Civil War, a White illustrator from Philadelphia named Henry Louis Stephens published a cartoon with the caption “Sambo Agonistes” in the March 3 issue of Vanity Fair (figure 7.1).1
Figure 7.1
The cartoon portrays Samson as a racially stereotyped Sambo figure with thick lips, unkempt hair, and torn clothing trying unsuccessfully to topple two pillars that support an arch labeled “Constitution.” The left pillar is labeled “1787,” the year that the Constitution was drafted, and the right pillar is labeled “1860,” the year the Sambo Agonistes cartoon was published. The cartoon’s caption reads “Dey Don’t Budge” as if this Black Samson is realizing that he cannot bring down the US Constitution. Although Longfellow and other abolitionists used Black Samson figures as a powerful warning of the dire threat that slavery posed for America’s democracy, Stephens’s caricature of Black Samson as a Sambo figure reassured his viewers that the debates over slavery were no real threat to the democracy.
Stephen’s cartoon serves as our starting point for tracing the use of Black Samson figures in the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We follow the development of Samson imagery in political cartoons that address issues of racial injustice throughout the early twentieth century, particularly in African American newspapers. Then we consider representations of Samson as a Black man in film, paintings, comic books, graphic novels, and on television.
In the late 1860s, as the United States began the fraught process of Reconstruction, Thomas Nast, one of the most influential editorial cartoonists in America, drew a Black Samson figure in a cartoon to address another controversial question—suffrage for African American men. Nast is probably best known for creating the contemporary version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party. His political cartoons also popularized images of Uncle Sam and Columbia as personifications of the United States and its government.2 Nast was born in Germany but immigrated to the United States as a young child. Raised in New York City, he worked as an illustrator for the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly for many years.3 His cartoons for this magazine took on a number of the political controversies of his day and helped shape popular opinion regarding presidential campaigns during the late nineteenth century.
In 1868, he published cartoons that provided scathing critiques of the Democratic presidential nominee Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York. With the support of southern Democrats, Seymour’s campaign was heavily anti-Reconstruction and promoted the disenfranchisement of African Americans. On September 5, 1868, Harper’s Weekly ran a cartoon by Nast titled “This Is a White Man’s Government” (figure 7.2).
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