The actress worked at NASA in the astronaut recruitment program
American actress and singer Nichelle Nichols, best known for her role as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the sci-fi television series ‘Star Trek’, has died aged 89.
His son Kyle Johnson reported that his mother died “of natural causes” on Saturday night. “However, the light, like that of the ancient galaxies we see now for the first time, will remain with us and future generations to enjoy, learn from and inspire us,” Johnson said in a statement on the official website. from Nichols, uhura. .com. “He was a life well lived and he was a model for all of us,” he added.
The presence of Nichols, a black actress, in a prime-time television series in 1966 was a rarity. Until then, African American women appeared as domestic workers or much lesser roles, while Uhura was still a member of the multicultural crew of the ship Enterprise.
Martin Luther King came to consider it “the first non-stereotypical role played by a black woman in television history,” CNN recalls. In fact, he was the protagonist of one of the first kisses between people of different races when his character kissed the main character, Captain James Kirk, played by white Canadian William Shatner. Nichols himself noted in a 2014 interview that the kiss “changed television forever and also the way people looked at each other.”
The series lasted three seasons and then Nichols plunged into the space race. He helped the US space agency NASA become more diverse with a program to recruit astronauts like Sally Ride, Judith Resnik and Guion Bluford.
Source: La Verdad
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