Historic lip service
Star Trek episode’s interracial kiss hinted at change five decades ago
WASHINGTON It was the kiss heard around the galaxy.
Fifty years ago, two of science fiction’s most enduring characters, Capt. James T. Kirk and Lt. Nyota Uhura, kissed each other on Star Trek, one of the first interracial kisses on television.
The kiss between Montreal-born William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols made an early statement about the coming acceptance of interracial relationships in a United States still struggling with racism and civil rights.
The episode Plato’s Stepchildren first aired on Nov. 22, 1968. Despite worries about Southern racism, the kiss was broadcast without much blowback.
In a 2010 interview, Nichols said Plato’s Stepchildren got the most “fan mail that Paramount had ever got on Star Trek for one episode.”
The episode aired only a year after the U.S. Supreme Court made interracial marriage legal nationwide.
A Wikipedia entry notes the episode is popularly cited as the first example of a scripted interracial kiss on television, although other previous instances have since been cited.
The first interracial kiss on TV seems to have occurred years earlier on British television on Feb. 1, 1959, in the U.K. on the ITV Armchair Theatre adaptation of Ted Willis’s play Hot Summer Night.
A later broadcast, You in Your Small Corner, featured a kiss between black actor Lloyd Reckord and white actress Elizabeth Maclennan, and was broadcast live on the U.K.’S ITV channel in June 1962.
Another such kiss occurred in 1966, when in The Wild Wild West, James T. West (Robert Conrad) and Princess Ching Ling (Pilar Seurat), shared a white and Asian interracial kiss (The Night the Dragon Screamed, aired Jan 14, 1966). In the same year on I Spy, Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) and Sam (France Nuyen) also had a white and Asian interracial kiss (The Tiger, aired Jan. 5, 1966).
There had also been a kiss between Sammy Davis Jr. and Nancy Sinatra on the TV musical special Movin’ with Nancy in 1967, a year before Plato’s Stepchildren aired.
The episode portrays the kiss as involuntary, being forced by telekinesis, perhaps to avoid any hint of romance that would risk outrage among some viewers. Also, Shatner recalls in Star Trek Memories that NBC insisted their lips never touch (the technique of turning their heads away from the camera was used to conceal this). But Nichols insists in her autobiography Beyond Uhura (written in 1994 after Shatner’s book) that the kiss was real, even during takes in which her head obscures their lips.