Kiss would boldly go where US TV hadn’t
It was the kiss heard around the galaxy. Fifty years ago — and only one year after the US Supreme Court declared interracial marriage was legal — two of science fiction’s most enduring characters, Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, kissed each other on Star Trek.
It wasn’t romantic. Sadistic, humanlike aliens forced the dashing white captain to lock lips with the beautiful black communications officer. But the kiss between actors William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols in Plato’s Stepchildren would help change attitudes in America about what was allowed to be shown on television and made an early statement about the coming acceptance of interracial relationships in a United States still struggling with racism and civil rights.
The kiss between Uhura and Kirk “suggested that there was a future where these issues were not such a big deal”, said Eric Deggans, national television critic for National Public Radio.
“The characters themselves were not freaking out because a black woman was kissing a white man . . . In this utopian-like future, we solved this issue. We’re beyond it. That was a wonderful message to send.”
Plato’s Stepchildren, which first aired on November 22, 1968, came before Star Trek morphed into a cultural phenomenon.
Worried about reaction from Southern
The first thing people want to talk about is the first interracial kiss and what it did for them. Nichelle Nichols
television stations, showrunners filmed the kiss between Shatner and Nichols — their lips are mostly obscured by the back of Nichols’ head — and wanted to film a second where it happened off-screen. But Nichols said in her book, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, that she and Shatner deliberately flubbed lines to force the original take to be used.
While inside the show things were buzzing, the episode passed by the general public and the TV industry at that time almost without comment, said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television and popular culture.
“It neither got the backlash one might have expected nor did it open the doors for lots more shows to do this,” Thompson said.
“The shot heard around the world started the American Revolution. The kiss heard around the world eventually did . . . but not immediately.”
Historians have noted that interracial kisses between black and white actors took place on British television during live plays as early as 1959, and on subsequent soap operas such as Emergency Ward 10.
Whether another kiss came first doesn’t really matter.
The Star Trek one stood out because it had a profound effect on viewers, Nichols said in 2010.
“The first thing people want to talk about is the first interracial kiss and what it did for them.
“And they thought of the world differently, they thought of people differently,” she said.