Deb Aronson

The Strengths of Sampson

The Alumni Interview

First appeared in Illinois Alumni magazine in January 2008 under Profiles

The first time Henry T. Sampson Jr., MS ‘65 ENG, PHD ‘67 ENG, lost himself in the microfiche room of the UCLA library, it was to blunt the trauma of his recent divorce. Little did he know that out of that misery would emerge his “passionate obsession,” a decades-long quest that would bring to the world the previously untold history of American blacks in film, television and radio.

“What drives me is curiosity,” Sampson says. “I love to learn. To me, that’s what living is.”

And indeed, the courtly Southerner has lived a life full of discovery - as a nuclear engineer at The Aerospace Corp., as a man refusing to be trapped within the confines of racial segregation and as a human being whose hobby inadvertently turned him into both history buff and movie expert.

An organized, focused and precise man in both body and habits, Sampson at times seems bemused by his unsought and unforeseen spot in history. An acclaimed engineer noted for his co-discovery of the gamma electric cell and the owner of several patents, he seems fated to leave his mark on both the scientific and artistic worlds. At 73, with his energetic air and a voice still carrying the flavor of his Mississippi childhood, Sampson appears to be having a great time in unfolding his story, not for the silver screen but for the printed page.

Newspapers to the rescue

The seed for Sampson’s expertise on blacks in entertainment was planted during his childhood in Jackson, Miss., where films with all-black casts portraying characters other than “mammies, servants and buffoons,” as he put it, left a big impression on him. Who made those movies, Sampson wondered in 1974 as his marriage dissolved, and how many were there? He headed to the library to find out.

By 1913, when blacks first entered the motion-picture industry, most U.S. cities with a sizable minority population carried one or more black weeklies. These weeklies held a treasure trove of information, and UCLA had an extensive collection of them.

“I started from the very beginnings, the 1900s, collecting information, issue by issue,” Sampson said. “It was fascinating. You can imagine how long it took to collect it all.”

What he painstakingly unearthed was a well-organized black movie industry running parallel to the white one. In the early 20th century, black-owned companies used all-black casts to make films that were distributed to black-owned theaters for their audiences to enjoy. Plots ranged from Westerns, adventures and action to romances and musicals.

Despite Sampson’s intense and challenging job as director of mission development and operations of U.S. Air Force satellites at The Aerospace Corp. in California, he found himself becoming more and more intrigued by the film research he was conducting in his spare time. Upon returning home from the library, Sampson would transcribe every note, first with a typewriter and, eventually, a computer. When his job took him on the road, he would take the opportunity to peruse other libraries as well.

Soon, Sampson realized that he had collected a great deal of information. “It was very, very fascinating, and nobody had written anything,” he recalled, “so I said, ‘Hey, look, I didn’t know beans about writing, but … maybe I should try to write a book.’”

That first effort, published in 1977 as “Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films,” is a seminal, 700-page reference book filled with synopses of black movies, biographies of black actors, five appendixes, as well as a history of the making and distribution of movies by blacks. Sampson’s other books over the years have included “Blacks in Blackface,” about blacks in musical shows; “Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910”; “That’s Enough, Folks,” about the portrayal of blacks in cartoons; and most recently, “Swingin’ on the Etherwaves” (2005), which, at 2,500 pages-plus, sells for more than $400. That book documents how the radio industry, foundering amid the lackluster lectures it was broadcasting, turned to airing shows directly from nightspots in Harlem. In essence, big-band leaders like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway revived the dying radio business.

“After that first book came out,” Sampson said, “suddenly everybody got aware of all these African-American films, so people started doing research on this area. “My book sparked that,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “You’ve got people all over the country now claiming I am the expert.”

According to Paula Massood, an associate professor of film studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, “Blacks in Black and White” is becoming more significant for film scholars as time passes, because it wasn’t until the last decade that historians began to uncover many of the titles mentioned in the book.

By digging around in the archives, Sampson “did a lot of the ‘dirty work’ for subsequent scholars,” she said, “and his work joins a group of recent studies that point to the long and quite rich history of African-American film in this country.

“‘Blacks in Black and White’ illustrates the sheer numbers of people involved and the variety of films made during the early part of the 20th century,” Massood said.

From Mississippi to Illinois

Sampson’s interest in intellectual challenges began when he was a child, following the example set by his parents, Henry T. Sampson and Esther Ellis Sampson-Marshall, both of whom enjoyed the life of the mind. The elder Sampson, an esteemed professor of mathematics, was executive dean of Jackson State University (the library of the Mississippi institution was named in his honor in 1970). Sampson’s mother, alive today at age 96, was the first black social worker in Jackson and the executive director of the Head Start program there.

Although he started out on the pre-med track at Morehouse College, Sampson soon turned to engineering. He enrolled in Purdue University’s chemical engineering program (despite never having seen a slide rule).

Denied good work in Mississippi because of racial discrimination, the new graduate took a civil service job with the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert. For someone who had never been west of the Mississippi River, the landscape was mind-boggling.

“My parents put me on a train, and I rode across the country,” said Sampson. “I can remember vividly seeing the country change … I could see the trees disappear, and then the desert appeared. And I thought, ‘Oh gee, what have I got myself into!’” While in California, he earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and met and married his first wife, Elizabeth.

Deciding to pursue a doctorate in nuclear engineering, Sampson sought a school with a working reactor. According to George Miley, a University of Illinois nuclear engineering professor and Sampson’s eventual thesis adviser, Illinois held the most advanced one at the time, an advance trigger reactor that, when it pulsed, produced 1,000 megawatts of power.

But Sampson’s ability to enroll at Illinois depended upon being able to find housing for a black family in Champaign-Urbana. Fortunately, the Sampsons (who had Henry T. Sampson III by then) found married student housing immediately.

“That decided us on the University of Illinois,” he said. “It was a truly great experience. There were high-charged people from all over the world. And the faculty and students were very close-knit.”

Sampson remembers fondly many cookouts and softball games mixed in with hard work. Miley, in turn, recalled Sampson as “a delight to work with. He was very self-motivated, congenial and collegial.

“I’m pretty sure that Henry was the first black Ph.D. in nuclear engineering anywhere in the country,” said Miley. “But within [our] department, everyone was so used to diversity that we didn’t even recognize or fully appreciate that until he left.”

At Illinois, Sampson worked with Miley to develop and test a Gamma-Electric Cell, a new device that was able to turn gamma radiation energy directly into electrical energy, which could provide a faster and more accurate way to detect radiation. “It was a great challenge,” said Miley.

Having earned doctoral degree, as well as a patent, Sampson then was wooed by The Aerospace Corp., based in El Segundo, Calif.

Work and play

The issue of housing reared its head again as he considered moving back to the West Coast.

“I told [Aerospace], ‘I am not going to work for you guys unless you can find a place for me to live that is no more than 10 minutes from where I work,’” Sampson said. “I didn’t know at that time that that was a challenge because the beach cities - Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach - were all highly segregated.”

After renting a home in El Segundo, the Sampsons bought a house on a quarter-acre lot in Palos Verdes Estates. Eventually, their neighbors’ anxiety about integration disappeared, and the neighborhood children befriended each other.

His professional life was also a success. In addition to Sampson’s competitive work at Aerospace, he wrote papers on rocket propulsion, direct conversion of nuclear energy to electricity and computer simulation of electrical systems.

A ‘blessed’ existence

While Sampson wears a warm and ready smile, he remains no pushover. When society told him in the 1950s that he couldn’t work in the oil business near his Southern home, he went to California. When society told him his family couldn’t live in a white neighborhood, he bought a house anyway and moved in. When someone threw eggs at his home, he called the police and said, “Listen, I don’t care what happens to me, but nobody better mess with my family.”

Sampson doesn’t take any grief, but he doesn’t give anyone grief, either. The retired engineer remains philosophical about life’s turnings (one of them being that, despite his extensive research on films, he’d rather read a book than see a movie). Sampson regrets the demise of the black film industry, muscled out by the financial power of a white market. He somewhat rues the fact that because of the attention he has cast on black films, the movie stills and lobby cards that he used to pick up for a quarter at flea markets now go for astronomical prices.

And when Sampson has bumped into ignorance over the course of his years, he’s nodded and gone around it. Sampson still lives in the modest, tidy Palos Verdes Estates house, with its book-lined study and large windows overlooking the ocean. His air of contentment suggests that life doesn’t get better than that.

“Even those things that were setbacks in my life turned out to be beneficial,” he said. “I’m not very spiritual, but I do think I’ve been blessed.”

Case in point: While Sampson’s interest in writing books grew from the pain of divorce, in the end it helped rejuvenate his love life. Set up on a date because they both were authors, he and Laura Young, an associate professor of language, literature and culture at Cal State San Bernardino, found that they indeed had something in common. They married this past spring and honeymooned in St. Thomas.

They enjoyed it so much they bought a second home there. None of the neighbors complained.