Was Kirk & Uhuras Kiss Actually the First Interracial Kiss on TV?
On November 22, 1968, Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Nyota Uhura locked lips for the first, and only time. Though Star Trek: The Original Series was always relatively progressive, the kiss between co-stars William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols was the boldest choice the show had ever made. Star Treks most famous kiss is often called the first interracial kiss shown on television. However, this isnt exactly true. Though the kiss was certainly historic, it was not the first. It wasnt even the first interracial kiss on Star Trek.  The History of Interracial Liplocking on TV      Play    Ricky and Lucy Tribute to Ricky and Lucy featuring the song from the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, Lucy Goes to Havana. 2009-04-03T21:39:56Z  The first interracial kiss on television happened nearly a decade before Kirk and Uhuras. According to the book Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, the first interracial couple on television was Ricky and Lucy from I Love Lucy. The characters were played by real-life husband and wife Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Ball was white and Arnaz was Cuban-American. The couple kissed several times on the show, which ran from 1951 to 1957. However, Arnaz was white-passing, so their kisses werent seen as interracial by the general public. In 1959, the action series Sea Hunt featured an interracial kiss. The second-season episode Proof of Guilt featured Japanese-Canadian actress Nobu McCarthy. At the end of the episode, McCarthys character planted a big kiss on the main character, Mike, played by Lloyd Bridges. Though McCarthy was clearly Japanese, the kiss was not given the same historical significance as Kirk and Uhuras. A year later in 1960, an episode of Adventures in Paradise featured another kiss between a white man and an Asian woman. In Big Surf, the shows lead actor, Gardner McKay, kissed Filipina actress Pilar Seurat. Star Treks actual first interracial kiss happened in 1967. In the first season episode, Space Seed, Mexican superstar Ricardo Montalban kissed white actress Madlyn Rhue. Montalban was a darker-skinned Hispanic man, but he was still considered white by the general public. Hispanic is technically a different ethnic identity, not a racial identity. However, the Pew Research Center found that many Hispanic people self-identify their racial identity as Hispanic. Because of this ambiguity around race and ethnicity, especially in the 50s, the public perception of a Hispanic person kissing a white person was not that it was an interracial kiss. Later in 1967, the first televised kiss between a Black person and a white person took place during Nancy Sinatras television special Movin With Nancy. Sinatra performed with entertainment icon, Sammy Davis Jr. At the end of their performance, they exchanged a quick peck on the cheek. Why the Kirk/Uhura Kiss Was Still so Important      Play    first interracial kiss Description 2015-02-21T05:21:32Z  So, Kirk and Uhuras kiss was far from the first interracial kiss on television. Technically, it wasnt even the first kiss between a Black person and a white person on television. However, Kirk and Uhuras kiss was the first lip-lock between a white person and a Black person on television. Thats why it got so much attention and went down in history as the first interracial kiss on television. Platos Stepchildren aired about three years after one of the most violent years of the Civil Rights Movement, according to History.com. 1965 saw both the assassination of Malcolm X and Bloody Sunday, the day when police brutally attacked protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery to campaign for Black voting rights. The episode aired just months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was on the minds of every American. Star Treks creator, Gene Roddenberry, saw the show as an opportunity to address the sociopolitical issues of the time, as Time Magazine pointed out in their profile of him. He believed that by putting these issues into a futuristic setting, he could explore them in ways that other media at the time could not. The allegories included in The Original Series are evident throughout the show. However, none is more evident than Kirk and Uhuras kiss. As television critic Eric Deggans told The Associated Press, via NBC News, the kiss suggested that there was a future where these issues were not such a big deal. He pointed out that none of the characters in the scene, human or alien, seemed to care that a white man was kissing a Black woman. The kiss promised that in the future, humankind would have moved past racism. This was a radical message in the middle of the bloody battle that was the Civil Rights Movement. Though it wasnt the first interracial kiss on television, Kirk and Uhuras kiss certainly was a historic moment, rife with meaning and hope. Follow the Heavy on Star Trek Facebook page for the latest breaking news, rumors and content!