A handsome, reedy Black man swoops into view from under the cover of nightfall, his chiseled profile partially illuminated by the blinding lights of the porch on which a terrified white woman stands. We have just watched this woman, Barbra, run amok through an abandoned farmhouse that is her only hope for refuge from the advancing zombie infestation that has already claimed the life of her pesky brother Johnny. Too distraught to ponder the thought that making herself inconspicuous might help her avoid becoming zombie chow, Barbra has already screamed, cried, sprinted, flailed, panted, and convulsed her way through the first fourteen minutes of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) before Ben, the Black man, even enters the picture.

Something odd happens when Barbra, played by Judith O’Dea, first lays eyes on Ben, played by Duane Jones, from underneath her still-intact flipped, blonde bob. She drops the theatrics and stiffens, growing still for the first time in the film. It is clear to our eye and to hers that this man does not resemble the bruised and pockmarked undead that are encroaching upon the house. Yet, the look on her face isn’t one of relief, but rather perturbation and bewilderment.

Ben’s abrupt arrival into the movie provokes a quieter yet no less reflexive fear in Barbra, whose debutante looks suggest someone whose parents would have probably placed a Nixon sign in their front yard. She is unquestionably shocked by the presence of this Black man to the point that she can’t take her eyes off him. Once Ben has pushed both of them back into the safety of the house and locked the door behind them, her gaze follows him suspiciously around the room as he gets down to the zombie-busting business at hand. Amid Barbra’s shock, Romero pulls off one of the slyest, neatest transformations in cinema, revealing Ben as not only a protagonist on a par with Barbra but, ultimately, the true hero of this horror classic.



In a feat of color-blind casting, Jones, a thirty-one-year-old acting student from New York, auditioned for and nabbed the role of Ben, a character whose race had never been specified in Romero’s script. When asked about his decision to cast an African American actor as the gallant center of a film with an otherwise all-white cast, Romero said, “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben…Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ’cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script.” Before he died in 1988 at the all-too-early age of fifty-one, Jones had lived many lives as an actor, an academic administrator, an educator, a scholar, a director, and an executive overseer of the Black Theatre Alliance. He worked on just nine films in his lifetime, including Bill Gunn’s perverse vampiric romance Ganja & Hess (1973) and Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking independent drama Losing Ground (1982).