Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols on Uhura's Radical Impact 

that and Nichelle operated other stations on the ship at time, including navigation and the science station.

Wow this attached to the wrong comment somehow.

Even Spock didn't know enough to be able to fix that console! Only Uhura could do it, putting every aspect of the ship's ability to communicate in her hands.

Exactly! Chief of Comms. She didn’t make tea and coffee. She didn’t clean the bridge. She was in a high-tech job with a lot of responsibility.

This! I was a young child at the time and unaware of racial tensions, but that scene where Spock unequivocally stated that she was the best person for this extremely technical job had a huge impact on me.

Also, once, in the animated series, in the episode The Lorelei Signal, Uhura commanded the ship to rescue her friends!

Whoah, what a great story! Very touching. ^ ^

Indeed. He broke the race barrier with all of them. We all love that Star Trek showed the first interracial kiss, but up until that show, NOBODY dared show a Vulcan at all on TV!

No one would have thought of having a Vulcan on any show..... He steped leaps beyond the galexy...

@Q UE And cloaking technology (:

Well, he was, from, .. the, future (:

Amen

I'm a 47 white guy, and I used to watch this show when I was just a little kid in the 1970s. I never thought of her as being special being black. She was just an amazingly beautiful woman to me on a television show I enjoyed. The racial divide actually was finished by 1990 but the damned media keeps trying to resurrect it. Conflict sells, for sociopaths, willing to go to any lengths to make money. BTW - Nichols is actually a better singer than she's an actress, and she's not a bad actress at all. Go look up some of her vocals.

@@fuzzywzheI'm 50, and I'm like you, I grew up on Star Trek and developed a crush on Uhura. And yeah, she's black, but so what? But it's easy for white guys to think so nonchalantly about race, it's called white privilege, and I'm not trying to offend you, but I'm a white guy too, and we've always had that luxury to not have the issue of race so thoroughly beaten into us on an everyday, everyhour, everyminute basis. We take that for granted. We say, Yes, Nichelle Nichols is a graceful, intelligent woman, and race doesn't matter. But once you do that, you remove the context of her existence, both Nichelle's and Uhura's. Yes, the entire point of Star Trek is to show humanity, 300 years down the road, has finally got its shit together, and these things don't matter anymore. Consider how much flack Roddenberry got for interjecting politics into Star Trek; while they were shooting scenes, marchers were getting beaten up by the police. Everything the people said about her in this video is true, that she was an icon, a pioneer, a vision of sheer class in an age where African-American women were only seen on TV as maids, and it's only a few years removed from the blaxploitation movies of the 70s, where they were seen as prostitutes. Nichols herself portrayed a madam in one of those movies. To say you're colorblind and to say she's just like everyone else is to diminish her place in history. To say you're colorblind is to say Nichols was disposable, that you could have put anyone in Uhura's place and Star Trek would have been just fine, and I'm offended by that. She wasn't the token black. She wasn't just a pretty black girl to spice things up on the bridge. She was sophisticated and intelligent and fourth in command. Race shouldn't matter, but all of human history has proven that it does matter. You and I grew up in the only 25-year span where, as a society, it looked like things were improving concerning race. From the death of Martin Luther King to the beating of Rodney King, you and I grew up in between, and I've come to consider it an aberration in American history, the only segment in over 400 years where things were looking up. To say the media keeps churning things up is to never have understood the depths to which racism went in our society. A good chunk of schools in the South were just being integrated when Uhura first took the bridge of the Enterprise. George Wallace was still campaigning on SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER, and here's Uhura talking to Spock and Kirk like they're equals. The media doesn't stir the shit up, the shit was always there, and I'm sorry if you thought it was ever solved. Save colorblind for the justice system, and truly, pray for it to become colorblind for the first time in America's existence. To say you're colorblind is to say you can't see something important, something beautiful, something deep. We can't embrace multiculturalism and diversity by saying we're colorblind, we can't admire it by claiming we have no ability to see it.

@@flagcoco69 amen

The whole point of the show was to show a postracial culture where Uhura was not a pioneer, just an engineer.

I fully agree with you. I think I was 6 years old, or so, when I started watching and loving Star Trek in the 1970s.

By the time I was growing up in the 80s I didn't even blink at the idea of a black female officer. We've come a long way.

still pretty heavy duty even today....

She was a OFFICER as well not just a jump for black females but females everywhere. I love the fact she gives the Vulcan goodwill sign in almost all of her photos..she is a true hero..and yeah my white boy self had a crush on her..still do..

@@benspencer5744 I had a white boy crush on Uhruha as well except that was when the Star Trek was in reruns in the 70s. When I watched Star Trek when it first aired in the 60s, I was too young for such crushes. Back then my favorite Trek character was Sulu, probably because he flew the ship and fired the Enterprise's phasers and photon torpedoes at least some of the time.

Robert Velez Nichelle not Michelle homey

Spell chick , maybe .

I agree

@@jso651 Spell check isnt going to work with her name

I'm so grateful they had that chance encounter. Things could've been a whole lot different.

RIP Gene

It was the affiliate stations (mostly southern) who said they would refuse to air the episode, not studios.

Well to be fair no women did. However, Majel did preform duties of the first officer (prior to Spock) during the original pilot episode "The Cage". Jeffery Hunter (Christopher Pike) dropped out after the pilot was rejected and was replaced by Shatner, Spoke became number one, and the rest is history.

So true

Agreed !

AmsterdamHeavy You're not colorblind nobody is

I hear you.. I thank my Mother she had me in 1962

i am certain that and Star Trek helped me roll my eyes 👀👀 many times @ statements like this .

😢 sad 😢 you missed it , hope you went on to bigger and better things

Oh I'm sorry. What a loss for them

so true!

We all did! Nichelle was and is a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul.

Is that a Khan reference? Haha

I must rewatch that episode just to 'hear' that line. I don't recall it.

Eric Taylor that’s what Whoopi Goldberg said when she first saw Nichelle on “Star Trek.”

John Winchester3567 don’t feed the troll.

Christ, can’t believe your takeaway from Uhura’s historical significance is lusting over how good she looked in a miniskirt.

@@jaksida300 Of course her significance goes far beyond the mini-skirt, but she was special. Along those lines, do you remember the horrible outfits the crew wore in the first movie? I am not sure why.

Miniskirts look sexist today, but what most people don't realize is they were a power statement in the 60's. Women wore them to express their freedom from restrictive, "modest" clothing, and the demure image that went along with it.

Who didn't? If you weren't at least a little attracted to Uhura then you probably wound up not liking girls. She was so beautiful and strong.

She'll always be the Bridge Goddess to me. :)

She was an entertainer: Actor, singer, dancer.

She also has an AMAZING singing voice!

@@dottyjyoung She's an entertainer: singer, dancer, and actor. What I've always admired about Star Trek is that its a show that can offer its cast the ability to realize the full range of all their talents. Many of the cast also got the opportunity to direct. I doubt if any other show could offer its cast half as much.

Oh yeah. She had quite a presence on the bridge, didn't she? Of course, by the time I was born in 1978, things were already different than they were in 1966, but even as a young kid I knew she was just as important to the Enterprise as every other bridge officer.

@jimmie jenkins Nothing more important on the bridge of a warship than the communications officer. They're the ones that receive orders and handle all ship to ship and ship to shore transmissions. In combat situations the only people working more overtime than the signals team are the Captain and XO. Putting a black female in charge of the signals team sent a message to anyone with naval experience.

She was and still is FINE

@@hagamapama She also had to know how to work on breaking code and other languages.she was a officer after all.

Wherever she is; I hope she’s restin at ease!

Yes, I have never heard that tidbit of information before. I love all her interviews and I am glad I saw this one.

Uhura showed herself to be willing and able in a fight in a few scenes, although she lacked stopping power against larger and stronger threats. In the mirror universe episode Uhura disarmed a woman holding Kirk at phaserpoint. One thing I dont think they ever did, at least not in TOS, is use Uhura as a damsel in distress. I'm glad of that. And I strongly suspect it was a personal promise made by Gene to Uhura that that would never happen.

Absolutely. She was stunning in all ways.

To Gretchen Mrenminting:Correction:You forgot Mannix's Gail Fisher who won several Emmy awards & Diahann Carroll who played the title role in Julia from 1968-1971.

Dunno about first, but she was a pioneer. A pioneer is someone who widens the trail for those who come after, and Nichols did that both in TV as an actress, and in the sciences due to her promotion of minorities into NASA. She is a cultural milestone for both people of color and females as they pushed for more equal treatment.

Whoopi Goldberg attributes her desire to be in show business to Lt. Uhura. :)

Yes there is Mannix’ penny fair in season two (1968) on, and Diahann Carroll in 1968 on. But Uhuru was introduced in TOS season (1966) so a couple years earlier.

Also no one remembers Mannix, or Julia. Not like Star Trek TOS which went into heavy reruns then movies and then remakes.

I barely saw the original series. If that is true why on earth even mention the kiss? A black woman as acting captain in the 60s? Beats a lame kiss scene.

People forget that when the character was introduced, she was wearing command GOLD.

It would have been terrific if this had actually happened in "Catspaw". Everyone who usually takes command in the captain's absence is down on the planet so the duty becomes Uhura's. IIRC the script gave her the conn, the network pressured against doing that. The producers gave in and had Mr. DeSalle take command instead.

Øystein A. That is because that was considered completely taboo at that time and to many was a huge no no worst than a woman leading

TAS happened a fair bit later, and I'm not sure that it was as groundbreaking to have a black woman in charge in the late 70s as it was to have a black female officer at all in the late 60s

Not quite. She had told Roddenberry she was going to quit, and he asked her to think it over and get back to him on Monday. That weekend she went to a fundraiser where she was told a big fan of the show wanted to meet her. It turned out to be Dr. King, who was shocked when she told him she was leaving the show. It was then that he admonished her, telling her the role was far too important for her to quit. When Nichelle told Roddenberry, he nearly cried. "God bless that man," he said. "At least someone understands what I'm trying to do here."

Funny.. sweet and funny.

Yep. No virtue signalling. Whenever the Captain addresses Uhura, it's either as "Lieutenant" or "Lieutenant Uhura." Star Trek normalized diversity 10,000 times better tan virtue signalling ever can. Uhura wasn't the only one though. The admiral in charge of Kirk's court martial was also of color, and the lawyer who prosecuted him was female. Dr. Daystrom, a leading Federation scientist, was also black. All of this would have been controversial in the late 60s Uhura was established to not be an outlier, in other words.

Star trek shaped the technology we have today. You can bet that there was one reason and only one that most flip phones opened vertically. I know I did the communicator thing more than once when I had my flip, before they went out of style.

I wonder what the world's wives thought back in those wholesome times.

@@jeromesassani9537 Oh some of them probably clutched their pearls, but they also probably watched along with everyone else.

In Roddenberry's original concept for the show, Uhura was supposed to be in a relationship with Spock, and Janice Rand was in one with Kirk. You can still see this in the very earliest episodes. That musical scene in Charlie X is the most blatant example - the girlfriend/boyfriend vibe going on there is incredibly obvious. But it became clear very quickly from the fan letters they got that the audience would be displeased to see either of the leads with girlfriends, so the idea was scrapped.