Bill Duke Instagram – We’ve lost another great talent and an amazing woman. Rest Well, #LtUhura, #NichelleNichols.
As Uhura, Nichols was one of the first Black women ever to play a main cast role on a television series, as “Star Trek” creator #GeneRoddenberry wanted the crew of the #USSEnterprise to come from many diverse backgrounds. Uhura, whose surname came from the Swahili word for “freedom,” was the ship’s communications officer with expertise in linguistics.
Nichols was going to leave the show for Broadway, but Martin Luther King Jr. convinced her to stay. “‘You cannot, you cannot…for the first time on television, we will be seen as we should be seen every day, as intelligent, quality, beautiful, people who can sing dance, and can go to space, who are professors, lawyers,’” Nichols recalled King saying to her in a 2013 interview.“‘If you leave, that door can be closed because your role is not a Black role, and is not a female role, he can fill it with anybody even an alien.’”
Her most famous scene coming in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” where the Enterprise crew are held hostage by a telekinetic race called the Platonians and forced via mind control into humiliating situations. In one such situation, #CaptainKirk, played by William Shatner, was forced to kiss Uhura. While not the first, it was the most prominent instance at the time of an interracial kiss on American television.
#StarTrek #WilliamShatner #thewrap #interracialkiss #TV #the60s #heidibfuller #realBillDuke #MPJINews #JudyPace #Actress #blackexcellence #blackactress #carlgilliard #shebaabrahaim #felixgiles #historymaker #firstbutnotlast #TedLange #MLK | Posted on 01/Aug/2022 04:16:11
