They kept cutting Nichelle Nichols' lines on Star Trek and telling her the part was small. Then she turned around and helped staff the United States space program. The first American woman in space and the first Black man in space both came up through the recruitment drive she ran after the show ended.
On the set of Star Trek, somebody kept cutting her lines.
Nichelle Nichols would get the week's script and watch Uhura shrink. A full page on Monday, a few words by the time the cameras rolled.
She was the communications officer of a starship. Some weeks the communications officer had almost nothing to communicate.
The people who ran the studio had a word for what they thought the part was worth. The word was small.
It did not seem to matter to them that Uhura was unlike almost anything Black audiences had ever seen on a screen. A Black woman in a position of skill and rank, treated by her crew as an equal, never once handed a tray or a mop.
There was something worse than the cut lines, and Nichols did not find out about it until later.
Letters were coming in for her. Bags of mail, from people all over the country who had never once watched a Black woman on television hold a job with that kind of steadiness and command.
She was not receiving them. Someone at the studio had quietly decided that Uhura's mail did not need to reach Uhura.
So at the end of the first season, Nichols made up her mind to leave.
Broadway was her first love. She had come up in musical theater, had shared a stage with Duke Ellington, and now a Broadway role was sitting in front of her.
She went to Gene Roddenberry, the man who created the show, and told him she was done. He was shaken, and he asked her to take the weekend and think it over.
That weekend there was an NAACP fundraiser, and Nichols went.
An organizer found her somewhere in the crowd. He told her one of her biggest fans was in the room and was asking to meet her.
She turned around expecting some Star Trek enthusiast. She found herself looking at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
For a moment she could not speak. She had grown up admiring this man, and here he was telling her that he admired her.
King said he was a fan of the show. He said it was the one program he and Coretta let their children stay up past bedtime to watch.
Then Nichols told him her news. She told him she was leaving the series.
She always remembered the way his face changed when the words landed. The warmth dropped away, and something very serious moved in behind it.
"You cannot and you must not," she recalled him saying.
He told her she had already done something that could not be undone. She held onto his exact words for the rest of her life.
"You've changed the face of television," he told her. "You've opened a door that can never be closed again."
He told her Uhura was not a small role at all. He told her that up on that bridge, in that chair, she stood ten feet tall.
Nichols tried to explain herself. She said she wished she could be out marching with him instead of pretending to fly a spaceship.
She never forgot his answer.
"You don't understand," he told her. "We don't need you on the front lines."
"You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for."
She went back to the set that Monday. She stayed.
Star Trek ran three seasons and ended in 1969. The bridge of the Enterprise was plywood, paint, and colored lights, and once the show was canceled, the crew took the set apart and hauled it off.
The show was over. Nichelle Nichols was not.
By the middle of the 1970s, NASA was building the Space Shuttle and needed a new generation of astronauts to fly it.
Nichols looked hard at who NASA had been sending up until then. Every single American who had been to space was a white man.
She put it plainly when she talked about it years later. "There were no women, and there were no minorities in the space program, and that's supposed to represent the whole country?"
She had spent three years playing an officer on a fictional crew that the entire nation was supposed to look at and see itself in. The real crew, the one that actually left the ground, looked like none of that.
So she went to NASA. Not in a Starfleet uniform, and not as Lieutenant Uhura.
She went as Nichelle Nichols, running a consulting company of her own called Women in Motion. And she made the agency a deal with teeth in it.
"I am going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants," she told them, "that if you don't choose one, everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it."
That was not a polite request. That was a promise with a consequence attached to it.
Then she went to work, and the work was relentless.
In 1977 she made a recruitment film for NASA. She walked the floor of the Johnson Space Center, looked straight down the camera lens, and called on women and people of color to apply.
"I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura on the starship Enterprise," she said at the top of that film.
Then she traveled. She stood in front of crowds at colleges, at Black sororities, at engineering schools, anywhere she could reach the people who had been raised to assume space simply was not meant for them.
She told them, to their faces, that it was.
She did it for months. Campus after campus, auditorium after auditorium, a famous face spending its fame on a government recruiting drive that most stars of her standing would never have bothered to touch.
The applications came back changed. Far more women, far more people of color, more than NASA had ever drawn before.
The astronaut class NASA selected in 1978 did not look like any class the agency had picked in its history.
It included Sally Ride, a physicist. It included Guion Bluford, an Air Force pilot, along with Judith Resnik, an electrical engineer, and Ronald McNair, a laser physicist out of small-town South Carolina.
Women on the list, Black Americans on the list. In the training, in the simulators, on the flight rotations.
In June 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
That August, Guion Bluford became the first Black American in space.
Both of them had come into NASA through the recruitment drive Nichelle Nichols built with her own hands. The actress whose television lines kept getting crossed out had just helped send the first American woman and the first Black man past the edge of the sky.
The Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off the pad on a cold Florida morning and broke apart a little over a minute into the flight. Everyone on board was lost.
Two of the seven were Judith Resnik and Ronald McNair.
Resnik, the engineer. McNair, the physicist who had come all the way up from a small town in South Carolina to a seat on a spacecraft.
Both of them had come out of that 1978 class. Both of them were people Nichelle Nichols had gone looking for.
She had stood in front of rooms full of young engineers and pilots and promised them the sky was theirs to claim. Resnik and McNair were exactly the kind of people she had been speaking to.
They believed her. They trained for years for it.
They climbed aboard on a cold morning in January, and they did not come home.
For Nichols this was personal in a way most grief is not. The faces in those recruiting rooms had been her whole argument, living proof that the space program could be made to look like the country it flew for.
Two of the people who carried that proof were gone seventy three seconds after liftoff.
Nichols did not stop the work after that. She believed the door she had pried open had to stay open, no matter what it had cost to hold it.
In September 1992, six years after the Challenger, the Space Shuttle Endeavour carried Dr. Mae Jemison into orbit.
Jemison became the first Black woman in space. She had grown up in Chicago, watching Star Trek, watching Uhura work that communications board, learning from a television screen that a Black woman could belong on the bridge of a ship.
Years later, at a birthday celebration for Nichols, Jemison spoke about what that picture had done for her as a girl. She said Uhura had shown her there was a place at the table, and that she had gone and taken one.
Nichelle Nichols died in July 2022, at eighty nine years old, in Silver City, New Mexico.
NASA released a statement when she passed. The agency's administrator called her a trailblazer and a friend, and said her Uhura had held a mirror up to America.
Think about where the whole thing started.
A young actress on a soundstage in the 1960s, watching a man with a pencil shorten her lines, being told by the people in charge that the part was small.
Sally Ride rose off a launch pad on a column of real fire in June 1983, because a recruiter named Nichelle Nichols had gone looking for her. Guion Bluford rose the same way that August, and Mae Jemison followed them both up in 1992.
They told her the communications officer did not have much to say. The communications officer got through.
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