Nichelle Nichols - Infinite Women

Born: 28 December 1932, United States
Died: 30 July 2022
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Grace Dell Nichols

Actress, singer and dancer Nichelle Nichols is best known for her work as Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek series, six subsequent films and Star Trek: The Animated Series. As one of the few African-American women to even appear, much less star in a major television show, her role as Uhura was so important that, when she was planning to quit after the first season to take a role on Broadway, Martin Luther King, Jr. convinced her to stay, calling her a “vital role model.” As she told the Detroit Free Press in 2016,
He reached out to me and said, ‘Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.’ He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She told King about her plans to leave the series because she wanted to take a role that was tied to Broadway.] I never got to tell him why, because he said, ‘You cannot, you cannot… For the first time on television, we will be seen as we should be seen every day—as intelligent, quality, beautiful people who can sing, dance, and go to space… who are professors, lawyers… If you leave, that door can be closed, because your role is not a black role, and is not a female role; he can fill it with anybody, even an alien.”
Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first woman of African descent to go into space, has said Uhura was an inspiration for her. From 1977 to 2015, Nichols actively promoted NASA programs and helped recruit more diverse astronauts, including women and ethnic minorities. From the 1980s onward, she served on the board of governors of the National Space Institute (later renamed the National Space Society), a nonprofit, educational space advocacy organization.
Nichols’ kiss with co-star William Shatner on the 22 November 1968 Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” was not the first interracial kiss on U.S. television, but it was groundbreaking given the show’s popularity. Nichols quoted a letter from a white Southerner in her 1994 autobiography Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories: “I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain’t gonna fight it.”
Prior to her work as Uhura and with NASA, Nichols started her career as a singer and dancer in Chicago before touring the U.S. and Canada with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton’s bands. She was the principal dancer in the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess, and had various acting and singing roles in the 1960s, including a guest role on Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry’s 1964 series The Lieutenant. She also appeared in a range of television and film roles following Star Trek, and released two music albums, 1967’s Down to Earth and 1991’s Out of This World.