In the 1960s, as the U.S. raced for the moon against the Soviets, space was a man’s world, a white man’s world—except on “Star Trek” where Nichelle Nichols integrated the bridge of the Enterprise as Communications Officer Uhura. After the show was cancelled, she went on to become NASA’s recruiting officer for women and minorities. Woman in Motion tells her story.
The snappy, fast-paced documentary will be a revelation to people who know Nichols only from television. She was born in Chicago before the civil rights movement, but her father, Samuel, was imbued with the spirit of W.E.B. DuBois. Black people can do anything, he insisted, despite the barrier. In Woman in Motion, she tells director Todd Thompson that as a child, she dreamed of becoming the first African American ballerina. Although that didn’t happen, her teenage musical theater roles in a Chicago ballroom led to her discovery by Duke Ellington who hired her as a dancer for one of his balletic suites. When the orchestra’s lead vocalist fell sick, Ellington asked her to sing.
By the early ‘60s Nichols was in Los Angeles trying to break the color barrier in acting. She debuted in Gene Roddenberry’s peacetime army show, “The Lieutenant,” in an episode about racial problems in the military. However, the theme was deemed too controversial for network television and never aired. According to Woman in Motion, this fueled Roddenberry’s determination to tell important stories in a different context. With “Star Trek” (1966-1969), the future became a metaphor for the present. The Federation was the Great Society writ large across the galaxy.
Roddenberry cast Nichols for the character she helped name—Uhura is a feminization of uhuru, the Swahili word for freedom that was heard across Africa as colonial empires dissolved in the ‘60s. As Woman in Motion points out, the Enterprise’s command deck included people of North American, Western European, Russian, African and Asian heritage—plus a Vulcan.
And yet, even in the 23rd century, Uhura found herself restricted. As screenplays were rewritten and edited, her role diminished as if to minimize offense to bigots in the audience. Nichols recalls being sick of repeating the “frequency open” phrase and planned to quit the show—until Martin Luther King Jr. told her no, “You don’t understand the effect you’re having because you’re there!” Interviewed for the film, Martin Luther King III recalls that “Star Trek” was the only show his father watched with the family.
“Star Trek” was cancelled because its audience wasn’t considered large enough, but that audience included many people who were or soon became involved in NASA. The agency welcomed her help in recruiting. “It’s like going from fantasy to fact,” she says.
