It was on November 22, 1968. Actor William Shatner, who played Captain James Tiberius Kirk, and actress Nichelle Nichols, as Lieutenant Nyota Upenda Uhura, brought their lips together in Plato’s Stepchildren chapter of the series Star Trek . The scene was censored in several southern states of the United States. Although Shatner assured that their mouths did not even touch, the groundbreaking kiss was emitted in full protest movement of the North American black population.
Just before this scene, Nichols had thought to leave the series due to the lack of relevance of her character, but it was precisely the activist Martin Luther King who convinced her to continue playing Lieutenant Uhura : it was not only a symbol of the presence of his race on television, but also women in something as supposedly masculine as the conquest of space.
Interestingly, the actress did not consider it as a milestone in television history. In an interview with EMusic.com in 2001, he acknowledged: “ At the time I didn’t think of it as the first interracial kiss . I’d just gotten the script and I was like, ‘Oh wow, great! Let’s have some romance around here! (…) Not many people know, but originally it was written that the kiss was between Uhura and Spock. However, Bill Shatner said: ‘Nothing of that! If anyone is going to kiss Nichelle, it will be me! ‘ So they rewrote it and we all laughed at it. ” Although there was concern about how fans of the series would react, Nichols herself explained that they received few negative comments and a lot of positive ones.
If you want to take a look at the scene, here we leave it for you. As you will see, in reality the kiss that Kirk and Uhura gave each other was involuntary , forced by telekinesis by some evil aliens.
Image: Archive Collection
