This weekend the actress Nichelle Nichols has left us who managed to make history by normalizing that the future of black people was not to be slaves or servants
The original Star Trek series has lost another of its iconic cast members. Nichelle Nichols He passed away this weekend at the age of 89 after going down in television history as lieutenant uhura on the command bridge of the starship business. She didn’t know it at first but she was an icon of diversity, in times when racial tensions were on the surface.
When Gene Roddenberry, creator of the series, imagined a utopian future, where war and poverty had ended and Humanity had come together for the sake of a common ideal of exploration and contact with new species in the galaxy, the racial issue was resolved with policies of accomplished facts. Uhura was the communications lieutenant and part of the ship’s command staff. No one questioned the color of her skin. It was a better future and those things just didn’t matter anymore because everyone was the same. The truth is that at that time, the actress was not entirely happy with her character. She came from the world of song, she had acted with Duke Ellington, and what he really wanted was to succeed in the musical. Perhaps for that reason we saw her in some other musical moment in episodes of the original series.
Nichelle Nichols herself told the story many times, since it was not Roddenberry who convinced her to stay. It was his own Martin Luther King. The racial activist made him see the important role that the actress had week after week playing a role totally removed from racial stereotypes. There was a black woman on TV who wasn’t a maid. She was an example for thousands of young people of color who saw how they could aspire to important roles. “You have opened a door that we cannot allow to be closed. For the first time in the history of television, we are going to be seen as we should be seen, every day, “King told her, words that were more than enough to convince her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn424lXdVwA
Another big television storm came in 1968 when the character of Uhura starred alongside William Shatner (Captain Kirk) the first interracial kiss in the history of the small screen. The moment occurred in the tenth episode of the third season of Star Trek entitled Plato’s stepsons. The Enterprise arrived on a planet dominated by alien beings who had assumed the culture of classical Greece and with telekinetic powers they use to manipulate the protagonists at will. The pretext that they were being controlled would serve the network well in case tempers got too heated. The racial question was more exacerbated than ever since that same year Luther King had been assassinated, months before the episode saw the light. Something was changing because it did not provoke as much controversy as was thought.
The original series of Star Trek was canceled that same year, but the image of Uhura would accompany the actress forever, who returned in all the films of the saga released for the big screen. From 1970, she was an ambassador for NASA using the popularity of her character to bring both women and racial minorities closer to the space race.
Nichols’s example was decisive so that two decades later, in the eighties, the actress Whoopi Goldbergwhen he was already a star on the big screen, he did not lose the rings to lower his cache and appear as a recurring secondary character in star trek the next generation, spin off of the galactic franchise. More controversial was the appearance of other actors of color for certain creative decisions with their characters. Lev Burton who played the lieutenant Geordi LaForge he had a command post on the new Enterprise, but his face was spent the entire series half-hidden by a visor, because his character was supposed to be blind. The same thing happened with michael dorn, like Lieutenant Worf, the first Klingon in Starfleet, for whom his true face also remained hidden by the makeup used to characterize him as an alien. In the next title of the saga, the producers made clear their intentions that behind the artistic maneuver of these characters there was no racial prejudice. Avery Brooks was chosen for the leading role as captain of the Deep Space Station 9. The first colored captain in a series of the saga. By the way, that in its fourth season the first kiss between two women on television was offered.
Uhura’s legacy has continued in the saga and they have been Zoë Saldana in the reboot devised by JJ Abrams Y Celia Rose Gooding, in the most recent and currently unpublished in our country Strange New Worlds, who have ensured that there is still an Uhura on the bridge of the Enterprise. Rest in peace.