Grace Nichols began taking ballet lessons at the age of seven, and was considered something of a dance prodigy, earning the nickname “Nichelle” for her graceful pirouettes. As a teen, she worked as a dancer, and sang and toured with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. She later toured with Lionel Hampton, and made her film debut with a tiny part in the 1959 film of Porgy & Bess with Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. As Lt. Uhura, communications officer for the Enterprise, Nichols is often credited as the first African-American actress in an American TV series whose character wasn’t a housekeeper or nanny.
The network, however, was very jittery about having a black woman in a relatively important role. They reportedly kept fan mail from reaching her, and nagged Roddenberry to keep her role in the background. Nichols was reportedly the only performer in the cast who wasn’t originally offered a contract, but instead worked on a week-to-week basis.
She considered quitting Star Trek midway through its first season, when her character had been given little to do beyond perpetually opening hailing frequencies. In one interview, she famously described Uhura as “a glorified telephone operator in space”.
Then, at a civil rights protest, she met Martin Luther King Jr. — who told her that he was a big fan of Star Trek. According to Nichols, when she told King she was thinking of quitting the show, he was shocked. “Don’t you know you have the first non-stereotypical role in television?” she recalls King saying. “For the first time the world will see us as we should be seen — people of quality in the future. You created a role with dignity and beauty and grace and intelligence. You’re not just a role model for our children, but for people who don’t look like us to see us for the first time as equals.”
Nichols is also credited with TV’s first interracial kiss, a smooch with William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”. Many stations in America’s south refused to broadcast the episode, and it was banned in England for almost 25 years. But it wasn’t even a romantic moment — space aliens were using mind control to force the characters to kiss, against their will.
The network was so nervous that two versions of the scene were filmed: one with the kiss, and one without it, where Kirk instead dramatically fought off the impulse. “When the camera zoomed in”, says Nichols, “Bill crossed his eyes and the director didn’t notice it until the next day in dailies. Of course the last scene was unusable and they had to go with the kiss scene, which became history as the first interracial kiss on TV.”
In the late 1990s and early 200os, Nichols served as spokeswoman for The Kwanzaa Foundation. She has also written and performed a one-woman show called Reflections, a musical tribute to twelve women who inspired Nichols, including Pearl Bailey, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Mahalia Jackson, and Sarah Vaughan. Her biography, Beyond Uhura, was published in 1994.
(more)