It started with a kiss

In the summer of 1968, two executives from the broadcaster NBC were called to the massive sound stage at Desilu Studios in Hollywood that served as headquarters for Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. The reason? A potential kiss between William Shatner's Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nichols's Lieutenant Uhura.

“There are two suits, they've got dark glasses (on) ...” recalled Nichols decades later about the filming, which was temporarily halted. Her kiss with Shatner had, by then, achieved history-book status as the first interracial kiss in television history.

While this is far from true — it wasn't even the first interracial kiss in Star Trek — it was the first white-black kiss that anyone noticed.

The death of Nichols at 89 this past weekend has prompted tributes and reflections on the importance of Star Trek as a progressive force in 1960s television and of her taboo-shattering portrayal as a Black woman in a position of power (as communications officer, Uhura was fourth-in-command of the USS Enterprise). Much of that legacy is bound up in that kiss with Shatner in an episode titled Plato's Stepchildren.

And yet it almost didn't make it to screen. It was in the script, which was why Shatner had leaned in and planted his gob on Nichols's lips. But the director, David Alexander, had panicked and called Shatner over (with Nichols standing there like a glorified prop) and then called in the executives, who in turn got hold of Star Trek creator Roddenberry.

He asked Nichols how she felt about the situation. “It's up to you Gene,” she recalled saying. Roddenberry shot the kiss first. He then filmed another take in which Kirk resisted the instructions that the aliens had planted in his head to make him kiss Uhura. (The plot revolves around the crew of the Enterprise having their brains hacked by diminutive aliens.) Shatner was determined to break the taboo around interracial kissing, so he made sure the kiss-free footage was unusable. Scrunching up his face, going “full Shatner,” he yelled. “I! WON'T! KISS! YOU! I! WON'T! KISS! YOU!” He was boldly going where no ham had gone before.

“The only alternative was to cut out the scene altogether, but that was impossible to do without ruining the entire episode,” said Nichols. Finally, the guys in charge relented: “To hell with it. Let's go with the kiss.”

When the episode aired on Nov. 22, 1968, executives at NBC were braced for a backlash, especially in the South — they had expressed similar concern earlier that year over a moment in a Petula Clark special in which she touched Harry Belafonte's arm. Yet the response was, in fact, largely positive. The BBC had meanwhile banned the episode outright — not for the kiss, but on the basis that it concerned the “unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease.”

“We received one of the largest batches of fan mail ever, all of it very positive, with many addressed to me from girls wondering how it felt to kiss Captain Kirk, and many to him from guys wondering the same thing about me,” said Nichols. “However, almost no one found the kiss offensive.”

Nevertheless, Plato's Stepchildren has come to be regarded as one giant leap for American TV. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Star Trek was pointing the way to a brighter tomorrow.

By the time the episode was filmed, Nichols was planning to move on and work on Broadway. At a party one evening, the actresses confided this to a fan of the show. Martin Luther King, a devoted Trekkie long before it was cool, was aghast.

“He said, `You cannot leave. Do you understand? It has been heavenly ordained. This is God's gift ... for you. You have changed the face of television forever.'”