“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Question: What is that sound?
What you’re hearing is a call to assembly. That steady gong is summoning citizens to a public ritual called Carousel.
In a crowded arena, the select group on their Last Day enters in white hooded robes and white masks. On the floor in the center, they gather around a massive crystal flower blinking red. They raise their left palms, where small flower crystals also blink red.
Then: One by one, they begin to rise, floating up, grasping at the air as the crowd cheers and chants: “Renew! Renew! Renew!” One by one, participants explode in a burst of sparks.
Where is this?
Humanity, or what’s left of it, lives in a domed city, protected from the hazards of pollution and overpopulation. These last remnants of society wear colorful loose-fitting clothes with wrinkle-free skin. They sashay around a disco-flavored shopping mall, oblivious to the outside world.
The palm crystal is a color-coded countdown timer: a Lifeclock. Nobody lives past 30.
What year is it?
The year is 2274. This is what the world looked like 200 years into the future to people who were living in 1976—as seen through the lens of me, a Black man and a writer, trying to survive in 2026.
Question: In 2274, do Black people exist?
According to Logan’s Run, you’d think the answer is no.
Legendary comedian Richard Pryor famously called out the film’s disturbing lack of Black folk:
“They had a movie in the future called Logan’s Run. Ain’t no niggas in it. I said, ‘Well, white folks ain’t planning for us to be here.’ That’s why we gotta make movies. Then we be in the future. But we gotta make some movies, some really hip movies. We done made enough movies about pimps, because white folks already know about pimping. Cuz we the biggest hoes they got.”
Was he telling the truth?
Pryor always told the truth. He had a voice that carries, shifting, jazz-like, from a nervous high-pitched chatter to a preacher’s roar, from the Sunset Strip to Africa and beyond. His jokes had an edge to them, sharp enough to shave the mask of respectability off society’s scarred, scared face.
But in this case, he wasn’t 100 percent accurate. At the 1:56:20 mark of the film, we see two beautifully melanated people enter the frame behind the main characters. This happens exactly six seconds before The End. Just before the domed city everybody left behind self-destructs.
They don’t speak. They don’t interact. But they are there. In the crowd, but not of it, the man with an afro and the woman beside him, heads high. No longer contained by the system they were born into. But unlike the rest of the populace, they seem unfazed by the revelation of an outside world.
Technically, there is another Black person in the film, but we never see him.
Question: If you cannot see him, how do you know he’s Black?
We hear him.
His voice also carries, its dignified baritone resounding against the ice cavern where Box lives.
Who is Box?
Box is a malfunctioning preservation robot. He used to freeze fish and plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea to feed the living. But when the natural food sources ran out, he started making ice sculptures and freezing people instead, Soylent Greening the unsuspecting citizens under the dome.
“I am more than machine. More than man. More than a fusion of the two,” says Box, voiced by the late, great classical stage performer Roscoe Lee Browne.
This sounds strangely familiar. Is there another Black man called Box?
Back in 1849 at age 33, Henry “Box” Brown, born into slavery, shipped himself in a wooden crate [3 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 2.5 feet deep] from Richmond, Virginia, to abolitionists in Philadelphia—where my grandfather was born—to escape the unspeakable horrors of bondage.
He spent 27 impossibly grueling hours, rattling north by rail, by steamboat, by wagon, seeking a freedom the law said he wasn’t man enough to claim.
Henry “Box” Brown was defined as three-fifths human. David Zelag Goodman’s screenplay describes Box this way:
Box is half-man…half-metal.
From the midpoint of his sternum to his hips he is coils and cables. One hand is a cutting tool. His head is half-flesh…half-metal. His legs are a chrome pedestal.
In transit, Henry “Box” Brown had to remain utterly silent or he’d be killed. In Logan’s Run, Roscoe Lee Browne’s Box spoke with poetic authority and was killed in six minutes.
Question: Is Logan’s Run a satire?
From a certain point of view. Despite the old-school special effects, the film’s vision of tomorrow holds a smart mirror up to society’s hyper-fixation on beauty and youth. The world has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel—at least from where I’m sitting in 2026, communicating through a computer.
You’ve got the Circuit, a transporter-style dating system, where citizens beam up to hook up. You’ve got your cosmetic surgery clinic where any signs of aging get laser-sculpted away. From test-tube babies to self-driving cars to a global AI controlling everything and everybody, life in the domed city hints at the hedonistic shape of things to come.
Except in the film, directed by Michael Anderson, citizens don’t live to see 31. They report to Carousel in hopes of being “renewed,” i.e. reborn in another body.
Or they run.
Based on the premise, I imagine Runners don’t get far. Who’s in charge of catching them?
Security enforcers are called Sandmen. They wear black and gray uniforms and shoot flame-spewing guns. The main character is one of them: Logan 5 (Michael York, who was 33 at the time), a curious Sandman with the aim of a caffeinated Stormtrooper.
After he presents an ankh to the city’s computer, he’s ordered to infiltrate the underground resistance. To sell the cover, four years are docked from his Lifeclock, which sets him on course to run himself.
Is this story meant to be a metaphor for slavery?
Not in the human-exploitation, Black-bodies-as-currency sense. But this is a closed system of coercion. There is a network of secret passages and coded language on the escape route, which calls to mind the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman, the defiant conductor who was called Moses.
And there’s a certain je ne sais drawl in the way Logan 5 says: “Run, Runner!”
But echoes of America’s oppressive history don’t end there. The film came out eight years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—a preacher like my grandfather—whose voice also carries, as it did in 1963, ringing out for freedom across the Reflecting Pool.
In the film, Logan 5 and the woman he’s running with, Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter), find that same Reflecting Pool forsaken. In the Lincoln Memorial, the marble statue of the president known for signing the Emancipation Proclamation is choked by overgrowth, tangled up in vines.
Later, they find an Old Man, who’s supposed to represent Moses, hiding out in the Senate chamber. That’s where Logan 5 gets attacked by his friend and fellow Sandman, Francis 7. The man uses a flagpole with a tattered American flag as a weapon.
The assault eerily mirrors Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, The Soiling of Old Glory. Taken just two months before the film’s release in Boston during the desegregation busing crisis, the picture shows an angry white guy thrusting a flagpole with the American flag at a Black man, Ted Landsmark, a 29-year-old lawyer and civil rights activist.
“It’s an image that carries with it a little bit of terror,” Landsmark said in a Needham Public Library lecture last year, “but it also carries with it a sense of hope about what it is that we can think about as we try to heal, particularly around issues of equity and social justice.”
Question: Is the film based on anything?
The novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson was published in 1967. In the introduction, the authors wrote: “The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength.”
The film takes liberties with its adaptation. In the book, there is no ritualized death-by-transcendence with Carousel. Citizens report to a private Sleepshop to be euthanized by good-feeling toxic gas. They are killed when they turn 21, which was raised to 30 in the movie (supposedly to accommodate York’s advanced age).
The book never says anything about race straight up. But reading between the lines, you might find sketches of the unsaid.
“Come see Black Tom.”
A warden says this to Logan and Jessica when they reach the ice cave. In a transparent block above them, they see a man, or what’s left of him. He has no legs, a flat stump for an arm, his entire bone structure exposed. His milk-white eyes stare out into nothing, head pressed to his shoulder, frozen in a diorama of mutilation.
He was black.
“He was a white man, once,” said Warden.
The warden explains that Black Tom is a symbol of what survival looks like, having lasted two whole years in a forever war against the elements.
Logan and Jessica then proceed to meet Box, which the warden says “ain’t a he. He’s a what.” Described as a consummate artist who lives to sculpt, this “insane half-man living in a self-created world of fantasy” claims to know the way out, but chooses to stay put in his “white wonderland.”
Box lived in a white world. He moved in storms of dusted ice and loneliness. He did not tire; he was never cold; a part of him never slept. His world was porcelain and pale marble, alabaster and bone ivory. He made castles of bergs and palaces of glacier cliffs. He cloud-wandered the frozen immensities.
And was content.
Like the book, the film depicts a Malthusian society. But on screen, in a world strained by overpopulation, the question becomes even more pronounced: Where are all the people of color?
Resistance is stitched into the concept, while the faces of those who fight back look homogeneously sterile. But here’s the thing: Logan’s Run is a cult product of its troubled time, not a capsule of it.
This is me projecting, a Black man and a writer, extracting meaning from text—like my grandfather did—to speak to what’s lurking between the lines, color and otherwise.
And the truth is self-evident: The only Black character with any dimension is never seen. Box is cast as a villain, crushed by a ceiling of ice, buried under the weight of his art as he hollers:
“My work! My work! My work!”
A Black man without a body. A Black voice in a box.
This sounds strangely familiar. Is the Black voice in a box a common trope?
One year after Logan’s Run, there was another.
Through the smoke of a captured starship, a towering figure in all-black armor with a flowing cape emerges. A different kind of box. A sleek, angular helmet covers his head, a bug-eyed mask conceals his face, each breath wheezing in and out in a mechanical rasp of menace.
“Where are those transmissions you intercepted?” Darth Vader says after boarding the Tantive IV and seizing Captain Antilles by the throat. “What have you done with those plans?”
The iconic, mostly bionic character makes his grand entrance in Star Wars (1977), voiced by the legendary James Earl Jones.
Question: Did Box walk so Darth Vader could run?
The man in the Darth Vader suit was a 6-foot-6 bodybuilder and English actor named David Prowse. He had planned to voice the character himself. But Lucas had his ears set on someone else. Someone whose voice also carries, a booming contrabass that has been described as the sound that “Moses heard when addressed by God.”
“George felt he wanted, pardon the expression, a ‘darker’ voice,” Jones told the American Film Institute. “So he hires a guy born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, who stutters. That’s the voice. That’s me. I lucked out, you know, from all these so-called handicaps.”
Jones, who grew up with a stammer, began reading poetry in high school, learning to wield his voice in debates and public speaking competitions. Drawn to theatre, he carved a name for himself on and off Broadway in productions such as Jean Genet’s Les Nègres, which translates to The Blacks. The original cast, including Browne, put Black actors in whiteface, a surreal flip of stereotypical scripts.
Genet’s play, subtitled “A Clown Show,” poses questions—“What exactly is a black? First of all, what’s his color?”—to expose racial prejudice, putting white spectators squarely in its crosshairs. Through subversive symbolism, the French dramatist wanted them to feel judged and derided and attacked, as he instructs in a prefatory note:
This play, written by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if it is ever performed before a black audience, which is quite improbable, then a white person, male or female, should be invited to each performance. The producer of the play should solemnly welcome this white, dress him in a ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the center of the first row of the orchestra. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the play. And what if no white person accepts the invitation? Then it would be necessary to distribute white masks to the black spectators as they enter the theater.
Jones won the 1969 Tony Award for starring as Jack Jefferson (a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson) in The Great White Hope. In March 1977, he recorded Vader’s lines for A New Hope in two-and-a-half hours for a flat fee.
“They paid me $7,000,” Jones said, “and I thought that was good money.”
He considered the role a “special effects” job. For the first two films in the original trilogy, at his request, Jones wasn’t credited as the speaker behind the forbidding “more machine than man” character, whose voice would ultimately become the most recognizable voice in movie history.
Both Browne and Jones—and others like Louis Gossett Jr., Morgan Freeman, Keith David, and Kevin Michael Richardson—represent an undeniable pattern you can’t unhear: the force of a Black man’s commanding intonation, used in media for impact, for gravitas, for cosmic power in worlds of sci-fi and fantasy where Black people aren’t usually visible.
Not every piece of art has to put racial politics on trial. Reviews I’ve read on Logan’s Run contain words like “cheesy” and “trippy” and “campy.” Most people don’t want their salted popcorn with a side of sermon.
True.
Is it accurate for me to say you dislike the film?
Yes. But only because I love it so much and, as James Baldwin said of his love for America, “exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
For me, Logan’s Run hits my ’70s sci-fi sweet spot—one of those pre-internet, post-apoc Twilight Zone-esque parables that take you on a retrofuturistic ride. A spectacle of a movie with something to say.
With its twinkling, synth-injected score by Jerry Goldsmith and Greco-Roman peek-a-boo drip from Bill Thomas, the film seeks to lift the veil of false vanity.
With its psychedelic sheen and vibrant nature shots by Ernest Laszlo, the film interrogates how we might leave the future better than we predicted it.
With its sprawling miniature set by art director Dale Hennesy and set decorator Robert De Vestel, the film is an experiment in scale, as if asking: If we are so small, how small must our minds be?
To be real, this is one of a few movies I believe actually deserves a remake. Because the ideas are all in here and timely as ever. It’s the packaging that could use a non-surgical makeover. But I’m also good if that remake never sees the light of day, in the name of preserving the picture-perfect irony:
Logan’s Run didn’t age well.
Would you write the remake?
Most definitely. That would be a dream assignment. I live to write dystopian thrillers spiked with satire. But writing in 2026, I’d have to change some things. Like the nation’s capital in ruins. I don’t know how believable that would be anymore.
Question: In 2026, do Black people exist?
We out here, trying to survive.
Do they have bodies? Or are they Black voices in boxes?
Yes.
What about your grandfather?
What about him?
You’ve mentioned him a few times in our exchange.
He passed away this year. His voice still carries, a rich baritone that reached out across the Bay Area and beyond. He was a fisher of men who served his community beside my grandmother, his beloved wife of 66 years.
Born with a heart murmur, convinced he wouldn’t live past 40, he always asked questions. And those questions kept him going, learning, overcoming multiple cancers, defying both aging and containment all the way to his Last Day. He was 88.
The last time I was with him was Christmas Day 2025. He loved gadgets and he gave me a 3D wooden puzzle that, when assembled, turns into a clock.
“Send me pictures when you put it together,” he told me.
But I live on the road, traveling around the world with my partner. We are Runners. I had to leave the clock behind. It was too big to carry. I couldn’t carry it.
Question: Are you afraid of dying?
I’m afraid of not living.
What is the difference between dying and “not living”?
One of them happens to you. The other you choose for yourself.
Question: As a Black man and writer trying to survive in 2026, communicating through a computer, are you not also another Black voice in a box?
I don’t know. Am I?