BLD PWR (think: build power) Day 2025 was a hectic one. Starting late in the afternoon, many African Americans flocked to the Ion District, a technology park in Midtown Houston affiliated with Rice University, to take part in this pre-Juneteenth gathering. Vendors of color were both inside and outside, selling everything from clothing to comic books to charcuterie spreads. A DJ was out on the patio spinning tunes. And Kendrick Sampson, the man who’d put the day together, was down below in the indoor forum, doing quick interviews with local media outlets and online influencers.
Rocking a baseball cap, T-shirt, shorts, and a few gold teeth, Sampson looked more like he was organizing a pool party than an uplifting event for Houston’s Black community. But not only is he the founder of BLD PWR, a nonprofit organization launched in 2018, he was also in charge of keeping the event as lit as possible. “It took about a year to set it up, a couple months booking things and figuring out venues and all of that,” Sampson said before getting whisked away to emcee the live festivities on the patio.
Sampson is an activist, but he’s also an entertainer—an actor, to be exact. Born and raised to biracial parents in Houston, currently dividing his time between Missouri City and Los Angeles, Sampson has built up quite an on-screen résumé. He’s done guest shots in many hour-long dramas, including CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Vampire Diaries, and How to Get Away with Murder. He’s appeared as the love interest in the drama feature Miss Juneteenth and the rom-com Something from Tiffany’s. He just finished playing the late, great music legend Quincy Jones in Michael, director Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming biopic on frequent Jones collaborator Michael Jackson. But fans of the HBO dramedy Insecure will know him as Nathan Campbell, the bipolar Southern transplant who has a relationship with lead character Issa (star and creator Issa Rae) in later seasons.
“I THINK ART IS NECESSARY TO CONNECT PEOPLE SPIRITUALLY.”
Similar to his Insecure character, Sampson moved from Houston to Los Angeles nearly two decades ago, when he was 18. Looking for mentors, he joined the Robey Theater Company, cofounded in 1994 by veteran actor Danny Glover. The black-box theater is named after Paul Robeson, a groundbreaking Black actor and activist who became a major influence for Sampson. “He’s still my favorite actor and entertainer to this day just based on what he went through, what he stood for,” Sampson told the Texas Observer on a Zoom call a couple weeks after BLD PWR Day. “He was the first Black international superstar, and they did come for him.”
The theater company is located one block from Skid Row, where Sampson would later work at shelters in the area. Sampson, who did some time living out of his car, had empathy for the homeless people who inhabited downtown LA. “I recognized who these people were and that a lot of them were like my family,” he said. “And I saw the addiction. I saw, you know, hard times. … I saw mental health issues. I saw a bunch of things that seemed like they were problems that would be solved, especially since it was so expensive there and it didn’t make no sense why it was so expensive.”
His fascination with Robeson led him to read more about revolutionaries—Malcolm X, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture. He balanced his acting work and his charity work, building a credit-filled IMDb page while also helping out the less fortunate.
When Sampson eventually launched BLD PWR, he was looking to merge activism and education with pop culture, inspiring others to fight for a cause while being creative—and having a good time. A perfect example is Roll to the Polls, an outdoor block party (held in Houston and LA) where attendees could register to vote and enjoy themselves while roller-skating.
With BLD PWR, Sampson may have cracked the code on getting more African Americans to get involved with activism: Make a party of it. As Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover’s music-star persona) famously reminded us in his “This Is America” video, there’s a lot of serious stuff going on. But we’re too busy being distracted by the fun stuff. As Sampson sees it, we could and should have fun dealing with the serious stuff: “[The author] Toni Cade Bambara says the job of the artist is to ‘make the revolution irresistible.’ I always shorten it to be ‘make resistance sexy.’”
Sampson delved further: “There’s a culture that we’ve built that, at its core, resists oppression, resists harm, resists the white delusion. I think art is necessary to connect people spiritually. To connect deeper than statistics, deeper than the political-speak in all of the academic language.”
He’s also gotten savvy at using his photogenic good looks to his advantage. On his Instagram page, he’s been known to post shirtless thirst-trap photos and videos that actually reveal some hidden videos pertaining more to racial or political issues in the carousel. This stealthy bit of social media activism keeps his posts from getting shadow banned. “What I do is, when I’m educating people about a bill—when I’m educating people about what’s coming down the pipeline or whatever—I would post a shirtless pic or some sort of pic that I thought I looked good in anyway, you know, and hope that everybody else thought the same thing,” he said. “I draw you in and hit you with the important information, and people seem to really enjoy that.”
But even as Sampson keeps the party (and the conversation) going, his thoughts are still on the poor souls of LA. Just a few days before BLD PWR Day, there were the “No Kings” protests, responding to the immigration seizures and National Guard deployments that were going on in La La Land.
It reminds Sampson of what went down in 2020, when the police murder of George Floyd incited protests in LA (where, of course, he took part) and all over the country. “I have to [be of] these two minds,” he said during BLD PWR Day, “making a space that is strategically built around joy as resistance—you know, bringing us in, understanding how we can build a common vision together for the world that we want to fight for—and also supporting our staff and folks on the ground in LA while they’re navigating blatant fascism, right? And so I’m just kind of, like, exhausted. But I think it’s worth it.”
As someone who believes art can be a tool, a weapon, and a way to express yourself, Sampson will continue to fight the power in entertaining but covert ways with his BLD PWR crew, bringing you the real and the really fun all in the same package. “I’m a storyteller at the end of the day, and I love a well-rounded story,” he said. “I don’t really believe in drama or comedy. I’ve been at Standing Rock, shot at by police with rubber bullets. I’ve been in some of the most traumatic situations where people are dying and being harmed. And no matter what, there is still humor in those moments. … There is still in [those] moments the fullness of who we are. And so I think all of that belongs in the story and the storytelling.
“Even when I’m pissed,” he continued. “I might say a little jokey-joke or two. But don’t get it twisted—that joke doesn’t make these knuckles any softer.”
