MBER THIS TREKKIE STAR blazing actress outshone tin Luther King
GACY COULD LIGHT A GALAXY
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He was from a wealthy family and would go on to be town mayor and she was from far more humble roots. No one wanted them to marry, but he refused to let others’ prejudices affect his dreams — a lesson he passed onto Nichelle.
She once said: “I was determined to be the first [ famous] black ballerina. I was the only African American girl in my class.
“But I grew up believing I could become anything I want to be. My father told me that.
“My mother used to say, ‘Please don’t put those ideas in the child’s brain’.”
By 14, Nichelle had found a talent for singing, and got a job at the only hotel in Chicago open to black guests.
There, she later met Duke Ellington, and when a singer on his tour became sick, he gave Nichelle a job, kick-starting her career, and sending her to Los Angeles, where she met Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
He gave her a role in his show, The Lieutenant, in an episode centred on race.
When the networks refused to air it, he dreamed up a new world where he could talk about current issues in a way the TV public would accept.
That world was in the 23rd century.
Nichelle had a brief romance with Gene but it was over long before she landed the role as Uhura.
Soon into the first series, Nichelle realised her character was being watered down by the network.
An encounter with Dr Martin Luther King stopped her quitting.
She recalled King said to her: “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 sing, dance, and can go to space, who are professors, lawyers.”
FAN FAVE: Nichelle with then President Obama
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She later said: “My first thought was, ‘What are you talking about, Dr Martin Luther King? He’s going to tell me how to run my life?’”
Nichelle later admitted: “But I realised playing Uhura was equally as important as anything I could have done. So I stayed... and never regretted it.”
Actresses such as Whoopi Goldberg and Vivica A Fox cite her as an inspiration, while Kate Mulgrew, the first female Star Trek captain on spin-off series Voyager, said she blazed a trail with “grit and grace”.
Minorities
But Nichelle made an even bigger impact outside of showbiz.
Working with NASA, she increased applications for the Space Shuttle programme by 3,000 per cent for ethnic minorities and 1,600 per cent for women.
In 1986, she saw Judy Resnik, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka, astronauts she helped recruit, killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
In one of her last interviews, she still burst into tears at the mention of their names.
She married twice, first aged 19 in 1951 to dancer Foster Johnson, the father of her only child Kyle, now 71.
She was married to second husband
Duke Mondy from
1968 to 1972.
After a stroke in 2015 and a dementia diagnosis in 2018, Nichelle retired from public life.
But she departed with a legacy as the first
African American woman to get a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame, an idol of President
Obama’s and a star with an asteroid named after her.