Black Samson of Brandywine

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not the only writer to popularize a Black Samson figure. Moving away from treating Samson as an abolitionist hero, other writers continued to develop this uniquely American Samson figure within folklore, fiction, and poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Samson became immortalized in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Black Samson of Brandywine,” which transformed Samson into a symbol of African American achievement. In this chapter, we highlight the writers who offer new understandings of Samson as a loyal American patriot. Folklore about the Battle of Brandywine developed a less revolutionary and more conciliatory image of Black Samson than those modeled after the biblical story.