“I Am the Night — Color Me Black” is not a popular episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Paste once ranked it 119th In listing the original 156 episodes and in the book “The Twilight Zone – The Complete Episode Guide,” author Nick Naughton writes that the cautionary tale “stands out as one of the dullest ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes in the show’s history.” He calls it “slow, talky, [and] dramatically obvious,” and notes that it “finds Rod Serling on his high horse without much effect.” In his view, the episode is existential above all else, concerned more with its message than any semblance of plot momentum. Jagger eventually dies, and the darkness over the city does not lift. A reverend (Ivan Dixon) declares that the darkness is hate, so thick in the air that it might as well suffocate her. “There will be sunshine again. There will be daylight,” the congressman insists. There isn’t.
While “I Am the Night – Color Me Black” is not an easy watch, it is one that seems as uncompromising in its sentiments today as it did then. It is not just the hatred of the bigoted man that clogs the air, but the hatred of the supposedly progressive man who shot him, of the citizens who showed up for the execution as if it were the latest movie, and of the leaders who drove this failure of justice. . “He Hated, he killed and now he dies”, says the reverend after the execution, addressing the whole country. And he continues: “You hated and killed, and now there is none of you who is not condemned.” When this episode aired, 44 states still had the legal right to use the death penalty. As the civil rights movement took the nation by storm, police began getting away with violence and abuse that made front-page news. And, according to the Tuskegee Institute archives, black people were still being lynched in America while “The Twilight Zone” was on the air.
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