Kirk and Uhura's kiss
In the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled "Plato's Stepchildren", season 3 episode 10, first broadcast November 22, 1968, Uhura (played by black actress Nichelle Nichols) and Captain Kirk (played by white actor William Shatner) kiss.
[3] The episode aired one year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down nationwide laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
Historians noted that interracial kisses between blacks and whites were depicted on British television during live plays as early as 1959, and on subsequent soap operas like Emergency Ward 10.
In the United States, interracial kisses were shown on I Love Lucy between the Cuban Desi Arnaz and white Lucille Ball, who was both his onscreen and real-life wife, in the 1950s.
[6] The United States Census Bureau uses the ethnonyms Hispanic or Latino to refer to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race; the Census Bureau states, "People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race.
"[7] In 1958, a decade prior to "Plato's Stepchildren", Shatner himself shared an interracial kiss with France Nuyen, a person of Asian ancestry, during a scene in the Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong, which was shown in an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show.
[8] Other shows such as Adventures in Paradise and I Spy featured kisses between white male actors and Asian actresses.
In the February 16, 1967 episode "Space Seed", Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban, playing the genetically engineered supercriminal Khan Noonien Singh, kisses Madlyn Rhue.
In contrast to this, in 2015, 17 percent of newlyweds, or at least 1 in 6 of newly-married people, were interracial couples, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
Shatner recalls in Star Trek Memories that NBC insisted their lips never touch, using the technique of turning their heads away from the camera to conceal this.
[12] Earlier in 1968, NBC had expressed similar concern over a musical sequence in a Petula Clark special in which she touched Harry Belafonte's arm, a moment that has been incorrectly cited as the first physical contact on American television between a man and woman of different races.
However, Nichols stated in her memoir, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, that she and Shatner deliberately flubbed lines to force the original take to be used.
[4] As Nichols recounts:[17] Knowing that Gene was determined to air the real kiss, Bill shook me and hissed menacingly in his best ham-fisted Kirkian staccato delivery, "I!
However, almost no one found the kiss offensive," except from a single mildly negative letter from one white Southerner who wrote: "I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races.
However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it.
[19] Nichols said in 2010 the episode's iconic status is due to its profound effect on viewers, commenting, "The first thing people want to talk about is the first interracial kiss and what it did for them.
