The ‘Star Trek’ Interracial Kiss That Made TV Executives Panic

“This is absolutely ludicrous,” William Shatner yelled. On the set of Star Trek, the late-1960s science-fiction adventure series brimming with aliens and strange terrain, such an assessment from an actor would not necessarily be out of place, particularly on a budget-conscious production. But Shatner’s heightened reaction was not the result of an implausible plot or a rubber costume. It was because NBC television executives were upset the script for that day’s shooting called for Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk to kiss Nichelle Nichols’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura.

The problem was not the kiss itself, which was acceptable even by the conservative TV practices of the era. It was because Kirk was a white man while Uhura was a Black woman. This, NBC insisted, would cause too much controversy, particularly in the South.

Shatner was unpersuaded by such reasoning. “Let’s just shoot the whole thing, and to hell with the South,” he said. Nichols, too, was furious.

Star Trek, in its third season, was used to pushing the limitations of network television. But a kiss was apparently a bridge too far.

1. Where a Few Shows Have Gone Before
2. A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss
3. The Undiscovered Country

Where a Few Shows Have Gone Before

The scene between Kirk and Uhura is sometimes credited as being television’s first interracial kiss, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In 2019, the media blog Fake History Hunter excavated a 1955 British television broadcast of Othello, in which Black actor Gordon Heath shares several kisses with white actress Rosemary Harris (better known to contemporary audiences as Aunt May in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films). But interracial can mean “any two races,” and so Shatner himself might have made history in the States back in 1958, when he kissed French Asian actress France Nuyen while performing a scene from the Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong on The Ed Sullivan Show. A year later, Lloyd Bridges kissed Asian actress Nobu McCarthy on an episode of the adventure show Sea Hunt.

If one accepts a kiss need not be directly on the lips, then Star Trek got ahead of itself in an episode where George Takei’s Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu kisses Uhura on the neck, and another where Uhura and Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) give each other a friendly kiss goodbye. Sammy Davis Jr. giving Joan Crawford and Nancy Sinatra a peck on the cheek during variety shows in 1965 and 1967, respectively, would also count. If the Trek kiss was the first of anything, it’s reasonable to call it the first mouth-to-mouth Black/white interracial kiss on an American primetime drama series—or the first interracial kiss in space.

In creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the 23rd century, racism and prejudice had largely been eradicated from Earth. Conflict came not from within, but from the Enterprise mission of seeking out new and potentially less enlightened beings. While viewers may not have been accustomed to interracial couplings on TV or in real life—the Supreme Court had only just struck down a ban on interracial marriage in 1967—it’s reasonable to infer it was a non-issue in Roddenberry’s sci-fi world.

Like its 1960s contemporary The Twilight Zone, Star Trek was also a place for allegory, where science-fiction could pointedly address social issues that television might have otherwise found too incendiary for viewers or advertisers.

On its surface, the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” wasn’t overly topical. Kirk and his crew touch down on a planet inhabited by a race of telekinetic humans originally from Earth and who call themselves Platonians after the famous philosopher. Bored with their own intellectual prowess and near-immortality, they indulge in malicious games where they force others to behave against their will. The cast is subjugated with humiliating behaviors and nonconsensual physical touching before regaining their autonomy. This meant the crew would be forced into awkward physical encounters: Kirk and Uhura, who otherwise had a strictly professional relationship, were compelled to embrace each other.

Nichelle Nichols, who was then one of the few Black actresses co-starring on a network television show, recalled that the script’s kiss between Kirk and Uhura didn’t immediately stand out. She thought the objective of the scene was how two capable people could cope with being out of control.

“Interestingly, the fact that this interracial kiss was going to take place at all didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time," Nichols wrote in her 1994 memoir, Beyond Uhura. “It’s not as if Gene announced we were going to commit this provocative act, although he certainly knew it would be the first. Given the fact that we were in the 23rd century and that it was quite clear from the story that Kirk and Uhura are kissing against their will, I didn’t see a problem.”

The problem was indeed there, though that didn’t become apparent until it was time to shoot it.

You May Also Like:

• The One Word You Can't Say on Star Trek
• What Do the Different Uniform Colors Mean on Star Trek?
• Bleep This: A History of Profanity on Television
• Why Is the First Episode of a TV Show Called a Pilot?

A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss

Neither Shatner nor Nichols were surprised by the script’s call for the kiss. Both had seen the script, and neither found it concerning or worth remarking upon.

But as they began to rehearse the scene, the episode’s director, David Alexander, appeared to be growing uncomfortable. According to Shatner, Alexander soon called for a break. Not long after, NBC executives were on the set and huddling with the director. There appeared to be great concern over whether the scene should be shot at all.

Both Shatner and Nichols were livid. Nichols attempted to explain to the executives that racism as 1960s America knew it didn’t exist in the show’s time period. The network brought up “the South” and how television stations might refuse to air the episode.

At one point, Nichols recalled to Shatner in his 1993 book Star Trek Memories, an executive proposed that Uhura instead be forcibly kissed by Leonard Nimoy’s Mister Spock, the half-Vulcan of the ship: “Somehow, I guess, they found it more acceptable for a Vulcan to kiss me, for this alien to kiss this Black woman, than for two humans with different coloring to do the same thing. It was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”

In Beyond Uhura, Nichols told a slightly different story, asserting the Spock idea had been broached but was rejected by Shatner, who wanted to have his character involved. Star Trek producer Fred Freiberger offered yet another version, stating in the 2016 Star Trek oral history book The Fifty Year Mission that the Spock idea was in an earlier draft of the script but discarded by producers who had deemed the idea too much of a cop-out. “I said, ‘No, if we have Spock do it, we’re going to have all these people screaming that we didn’t have the guts to have a white man kiss her,’ ” Freiberger said.

Finally, Roddenberry was called to the set. Even though he had by then taken a back seat and left day-to-day operations to others, his status as creator and showrunner worked in his favor. When executives continued arguing, Roddenberry made a concession: They would shoot the scene, but from two different angles. One would be a full-on kiss, while the other wouldn’t show the actual lip-locking, just imply it.

This seemed to placate the executives. Shatner, Nichols, and Alexander did as Roddenberry asked, though they were hoping to delay the second take for as long as possible. According to Nichols, their plan was to run out of time in the shooting day before the off-screen take could be filmed. They were unsuccessful, and Alexander got both shots. (Though Nichols would later say Shatner may have flubbed the second take on purpose by crossing his eyes before going in for the off-camera kiss, rendering it unusable.)

Despite their nervousness, NBC executives didn’t continue to fight the scene. In fact, they changed their stance entirely.

The Undiscovered Country

In a 2016 piece reflecting on the episode, the industry trade publication The Hollywood Reporter dropped an interesting bit of information. Prior to the episode’s original airdate on November 22, 1968, NBC took out an advertisement in the paper promoting the possibility of the interracial kiss. Rather than erase it, the network now wanted to exploit it.

One possibility for that change in thinking was that Star Trek, never a huge ratings winner, was struggling. (The end of the 1968–’69 season would be the series’ third and final.) Another was that, as Nichols observed, both Kirk and Uhura were kissing against their will. A third was that Shatner’s clowning made the safer take useless.

“The only alternative was to cut out the scene altogether, but that was impossible to do without ruining the entire episode,” Nichols wrote in Beyond Uhura. “Finally, the guys in charge relented: ‘To hell with it. Let’s go with the kiss.’ I guess they figured we were going to be canceled in a few months anyway. And so the kiss stayed.”

Nichols recalled that there was no deluge of hate mail, as NBC feared. Instead, correspondence was uniformly positive. Star Trek had gone where no primetime American drama series had gone before; television remained unharmed.

“It neither got the backlash one might have expected nor did it open the doors for lots more shows to do this,” Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, told NBC News in 2018. “The shot heard around the world started the American Revolution. The kiss heard around the world eventually did … but not immediately.”

A look at the contemporaneous media coverage at the time reveals virtually no comment about the episode or its would-be controversy. In fact, it would be some years before anyone began to regard “Plato’s Stepchildren” as a milestone in the Star Trek canon. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979, a columnist looking back on the history of the show referred to it as having “TV’s first interracial kiss,” a misnomer that still crops up.

With respect to other pioneering programs like 1955’s Othello, it’s likely that Star Trek is singled out because of its subsequent and enduring cultural relevance. That a popular show could help break a societal taboo is certainly worthy of acknowledgement.

Curiously, the only place where the episode ran into problems wasn’t in the South but in England. The BBC initially refused to air it because of its themes of torture, madness, and sadism, correctly noting that it was the malicious behavior of the aliens that was questionable, not an interracial kiss.

Read More About Star Trek: