![]() Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner in Plato’s Stepchildren, the episode of Star Trek which featured the US’s first small-screen kiss between a black woman and a white man. She saw Uhura – her name was based on uhuru, the Swahili for “freedom” – not only as a role model for black people, but also for women with ambitions to become astronauts or scientists. ![]() ![]() Returning to the part that she had seen simply as a stepping stone to Broadway, Nichols took it more seriously and reprised it in the original Star Trek’s spin-off films. “He said I had the first non-stereotypical role, I had a role with honour, dignity and intelligence,” she recalled in a 2011 television programme. When Nichols considered leaving Star Trek at the end of the first run, a chance meeting with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King at a fundraising event changed her mind. She was also involved in the US’s first small-screen kiss between a black woman and a white man, Uhura and Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner), in 1968. ![]() ![]() The actor and singer Nichelle Nichols, who has died aged 89, was one of the first black women to be featured on American television in a non-subservient role when she played the communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek series (1966-69). ![]()
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