When Star Trek’s first regular episode after the pilot was in pre-production, the director Joseph Sargent noticed a glaring problem. All of the seats that ringed the futuristic bridge of the Enterprise, including the communications chair, were to be filled with white, male actors. Sargent reflexively felt it was wrong that Black people should not be represented in the show’s vision of the future.
Sargent later recalled: “We had a good representation–a good diversity in virtually all ethnic areas–except Black people. There wasn’t a Black actor in the group and I gingerly, and obsessively, approached Gene.”
When filming began on The Corbomite Maneuver, Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura was seated at her iconic and historic place on the bridge. Sargent and Roddenberry’s idea–whites and people of color inhabiting the same space as equals–was a radical, and risky, departure from most Americans’ lived experience in 1966.
They were also following precedent established in the pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before, which was filmed a year earlier. When we first enter the bridge in that episode, there are two Black officers present. When the department heads arrive one is an Asian man, George Takei; one is a Scotsman, James Doohan; one is a woman, Sally Kellerman’s Dr. Dehner. One of the Black actors, Lloyd Haynes, has a piece of dialogue, and he remains on the bridge throughout the episode. He was seated at the communications console, and identified in the script as Communications Officer Lt. Alden.
According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages, Roddenberry expected Haynes might have a larger presence if the series was picked up. That did not work out, and in the next script a white man was called for to become the Enterprise’s comms officer. Instead, thanks to Sargent, a Black woman–Nichols–was chosen to fill the seat.
Uhura and Sulu were able to explore, argue, tease, flirt, sing, and swashbuckle with their white peers. But their inclusion is only part of the story of Star Trek’s racial diversity. People of color were chosen as background extras, small speaking roles, and guest stars. Every week of the 1966-67 television season except for one, you would have tuned in to see Black and brown people in uniform on board a starship. The white writers, directors and producers of the show, in ways big and small, made sure that the Enterprise was not a whites-only space.
Sociologist Elijah Anderson coined the term white space to describe “settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” Black people “typically approach that space with care… they can feel uneasy and consider it to be informally ‘off limits.’” Meanwhile white people are scarcely aware these spaces exist or of how uncomfortable Black people become when in them. Think of it as a dimensional realm of subspace. To the people who live there, it’s home sweet home. But for trans-dimensional beings, you get noticed, and it can be a chilly, hostile place to visit. Anderson explains: “When the anonymous black person enters the white space, others there immediately try to make sense of him or her—to figure out ‘who that is,’ or to gain a sense of the nature of the person’s business and whether they need to be concerned.”
Anderson wrote this paper in 2014, trying to explain the peculiar ways our modern society still segregates by race, and the conflicts–sometimes deadly–that arise when Black people enter white spaces. But the reason we have white and Black spaces today is because of the entrenched segregation of Jim Crow. Star Trek’s first viewers lived in a society where laws enforced racial separation just about anywhere you could think of.
In 1937 Oklahoma required telephone companies to install whites-only phone booths. In 1955 Tennessee passed a law that required mine operators to install separate bathrooms for white and Black miners. In 1956 Kentucky passed a slew of Jim Crow laws: separate waiting rooms and bathrooms; separate tuberculosis hospitals; separate public transit; facilities that served food had to have separate dining rooms and provide separate sets of eating utensils. In that state and many others it was illegal for a Black person to dance with a white person or walk together through a public park or playground. Spock and Uhura’s musical performances in the rec room would have been punishable by jail time in some of these places.
Well into the 1960s in Seattle, and many other American cities, realtors were barred from “introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” In Texas in 1960 it was a crime for a Black and white person to live in the same house, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Interracial marriage was illegal until June 1967. The 1950s saw a raft of laws prohibiting mixed race adoptions, which Amanda Grayson and Sarek would have found quite illogical. In 1967 Sarasota, Florida passed this law: “Whenever members of two or more races shall be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or another officer… to clear the area involved of all members of all races present.”
The service branches that Starfleet was modeled after had only recently been desegregated. Truman’s executive order desegregating the military was signed in 1948, but it was ignored or slow walked for years. The last racially segregated unit of Black soldiers was not abolished until 1954. None of the former service members who worked on Star Trek–men like Roddenberry, Robert Justman, and James Doohan–would have ever had the experience of serving equally with any African American.
During the two decades preceding Star Trek’s debut, America had been–and was still–engaged in a fit of declaring itself a white space.
1960s Hollywood was not immune from this racism, and so the prime-time lineup was also a white space. Roddenberry’s show prior to Star Trek, The Lieutenant (1963-64), was set in a contemporary Marine Corps training camp. One episode depicted a Black Marine taking abuse from a racist white Marine. The network refused to air it, and soon after the series was canceled. In Riverboat (1959-61), there was a network edict that warned script writers “no Negros were ever to be seen” on the series, which was set in 1860 Mississippi, a time when the population of that state was 55% Black. If the networks could berate progressive-leaning writers and directors into pretending that all the Black people were simply “below decks” on Riverboat, it would have been just as easy to pretend they were out of sight on the Enterprise too. But Star Trek refused to play along.
Consider these numbers for season one:
- 75% of episodes had people of color as background extras
- 39% of episodes featured people of color with guest speaking roles
- 5 episodes featured people of color in the main guest star role
Background Extras
The presence of diversity in background extras may sound trivial, but it was a subtle yet powerful way that Star Trek demonstrated inclusivity. The Enterprise crew was filled with people of color working and socializing alongside their white crew members as equals. In the first few moments of Balance of Terror, we see a Black man, Black woman, and Asian woman attending the wedding ceremony, and on the bridge a Filipino man takes over the helm.
In Court Martial, at least two Black officers are seen in the starbase club, and an Indian man named Captain Chandra was seated with Commodore Stone on the judges panel. In The Conscience of the King we see in the background an Asian and Indian man, and the same Filipino man, who had an important part as the security guard who confronted Kodos. Many extras reappeared throughout the series. The Filipino actor, Ron Veto, was in ten episodes.
One of the wedding guests was played by an unknown Black extra who appeared in two other episodes, including on the security detail that went after the Horta in The Devil in the Dark. In Memory Alpha his name is listed as Lewis.
If you watch the background extras on the bridge and hustling past our regulars in the corridor, you are also struck by the near parity between men and women, and many of them are women of color. In Operation: Annihilate!, of the four female officers seen on the bridge one is Latina or hispanic and one is Yeoman Zarah played by Moroccan actress Maurishka Tagliaferro. She also got in on some away team action.
It would have been easy to have all the extras look like this guy:
And in many shows and movies, especially in science-fiction, that’s how it was for decades: a monochrome pallet of square-jawed white faces. Star Trek’s directors and producers chose diversity.
You might say diverse background extras are fine, but can you give them some lines? That was done too.
Speaking Extras
We’ve already mentioned how Lloyd Haynes was given a few lines and some reaction shots in the series pilot, teasing the possibility that he could become a recurring character. At least 9 episodes in season one had actors of color with small but noticeable speaking roles.
In The Enemy Within, Black actor Garland Thompson played a transporter technician who was prominent throughout the episode and had more lines than Uhura. Thompson was also a background extra in Charlie X. In Shore Leave, Lieutenant Esteban Rodriguez was one of the non-regular characters who had adventures on the pleasure planet. He was played by Julios Caesar Lopez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, and was billed as a co-star for this episode. In Space Seed, Lieutenant Spinelli, played by native Hawaiian actor Blaisdell Makee, had some scenes bravely resisting Kahn.
In Court Martial, the Enterprise’s Personnel Officer is played by Asian actress Nancy Wong. In A Taste of Armageddon, Yeoman Tamura is played by Japanese-American actress Miko Mayama. In early scripts, both of these roles were to be portrayed by Yeoman Janice Rand and had to be rewritten after Grace Lee Whitney left the show. The producers and directors could have recast the roles with white, blond actresses who looked like Whitney, but instead they chose these two Asian women.
One of the most significant and interesting cases in this category is Janet MacLachlan as Lieutenant Charlene Masters in The Alternative Factor. Gerd Oswald, the episode director, and Joe D’Agosta, head of casting, wanted to hire a Black actress to play Lazarus’s love interest. It would have been TV’s first interracial romance, complete with passionate kissing and ending with the two of them joined together for eternity in the inter-dimensional corridor. Unfortunately NBC balked. As Marc Cushman put it, there was concern about “how affiliates in the South might react.” There were many other script problems, including the fact that Masters sabotages the ship over a man she just met, and so Gene Coon kept the character and the actress but jettisoned the love affair. While the role was much smaller than intended, MacLachlan got to play a competent and heroic officer whose quick action saves the ship.
MacLachlan’s presence is important not just for her skin color but also her hair. Someone decided that MacLachlan should not wear a wig, that Masters would wear her hair natural. Cushman quotes from an interview he did with Coon’s secretary Ande Richardson-Kindryd, who was deeply moved by this choice:
“My mother had made me swear that I would always wear a wig to work because I should not ever let them see my natural hair. It was just too radical. It was very courageous that she wore her hair in an Afro at that time… But the people at Star Trek thought in those terms–individual rights; personal choices. It was a very freeing environment, and a very positive message. So now I knew I was finally at a place where I felt that we had a chance to be–we, being Black people. I took off my wig and stuck my head under a water tap and combed out my Afro and went back to work. I sat down at my desk and no one ever said a word to me and I knew I was at a place where I belonged, that this was home and I was with good people.”
In 1966-67, for many Black women and girls, and Black men and boys, it must have felt that Star Trek was a place they belonged too.
Guest Stars
Full-fledged guest stars had to carry the weight of at least half of the episode, going toe-to-toe with the series’s regular heroes. The actors got top billing after Shatner and Nimoy, and would have been familiar faces to much of the TV audience. In five episodes of season one, this coveted spot was filled by people of color, all men.
In The Galileo Seven, the bad guys were the cavemen aliens of Taurus II, but since the real conflict was Spock’s internal struggle for the command of his crew, the true antagonist was Lieutenant Boma, an astro-physicist, played by Don Marshall. From the first time we see him in the shuttle, Marshall gives Boma a gravitas unusual for a lieutenant-of-the-week. His stance in the seat behind Spock is relaxed and confident. He looks like a man who knows he belongs there. Boma assertively pushes back on Spock’s command decisions, and McCoy ends up convincing Spock that Boma’s criticisms are justified and correct. Boma gets Spock to the right place and the script never turns him meek or apologetic.
Marshall later said about the role: “There was no shyness or hold back because of race. You didn’t get that a lot on TV at that time, where a Black man could speak his mind to a white man without being regarded as out-of-line. Gene Roddenberry and the other people on the show, like Leonard Nimoy, were greatly concerned about the show and about the people on it, and how it depicted the future. There’s so much beauty in that.”
In Court Martial we have another no-nonsense, commanding Black guest star, Percy Rodriguez as Commodore Stone, the commanding officer of Starbase 11. This was the first time audiences had visited a Starbase or met a commodore. Stone not only put Kirk on trial but said this famous quote: “Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done. Command a starship. A hundred decisions a day, hundreds of lives staked on you making every one of them right.” When those lines were written, the U.S. Navy had no African American captains. Samuel Lee Gravely Jr. became the first Black officer to reach the rank of captain in 1967.
Two episodes had major guest star roles played by Jewish actors. In The Menagerie we meet Commodore Jose Mendez, another commanding officer of Starbase 11. Even though the actor, Malachi Throne, was born to Austro Hungarian Jews before World War II, we might be able to infer based on his name that the character is Hispanic. In A Taste of Armageddon, the alien Anan 7 is played by David Opatovsky. Born in New York City, his father was a Yiddish novelist from Poland. Opatovsky had semetic features that landed him both Jewsish and Arabic roles. Both characters are devoid of any ethnic stereotypes whatsoever.
Finally, the most significant guest role of the season, if not the entire franchise, was Ricardo Montalban’s Kahn Singh in Space Seed. Mondalban was born in Mexico City, moving to Los Angeles to have a film career. While Khan was most likely of Indian descent, not Hispanic, he was a person of color portraying the ultimate villain who nonetheless earned the respect, even grudging admiration, of the Enterprise crew. There is also an anti-colonialism aspect to the character. For a hundred years the native peoples of European or American colonies, whether Indian or Hispanic or Asian, had been depicted in popular culture as obedient, slovenly, lazy, and stupid. Khan is the opposite of those things. In fact the writers gave him the courage, cunning, and ruthlessness typical of white colonizers. “I’ve gotten something else I wanted,” he tells Kirk before beaming down to Ceti Alpha V. “A world to win, an empire to build.” By reversing these roles, the episode makes a mockery of colonial racism.
To show how Star Trek’s message of inclusivity was noticed at the time, I will close with two quotes from fan letters Roddenberry received after some of the episodes mentioned above.
“The ethnic backgrounds represented within the cast are exactly as they should be, for it will require the best of all Earth to achieve in fact what you are presenting as today’s fiction” (1967)
“The crew of the Enterprise, comprised of all the nations and races of Earth working together in a joint effort, provides hope for the future of mankind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be alive when these ‘fiction’ stories of today becomes tomorrow’s truths. (1966)