You May Be Cool But, You’ll Never be MLK Jr influencing Famous peoples Career Path cool.
King convinced Nichelle Nichols (who incidentally later went on to work for NASA), to continue on playing the role of “Uhura” on Star Trek after the first season. Nichols said that he had told her at the time, not to leave the show simply because not only was she playing the role of a main character on TV, she also wasnt playing a character that conformed to the “black TV standards” in that day in time, instead she was actually a powerful character equal to those around her.
Then intern it had a larger effect; Whoopi Goldberg once announced that when she seen Uhura(Nichols) on TV, she said to her Mother: “Momma! There’s a black lady on TV, and she ain’t no maid!” She state that it was partially because of Nichols that she became such a huge StarTrek fan and later why she pushed so hard to get a character on StarTrek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producer that shed actually to be on the show. Astronaut Ronald McNair, was inspired to become an astronaut because of the character of Uhura. He was the second black person in space who ended up being on of the people who passed away in the Challenger explosion. McNair’s brother stated, ____”Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together. I just looked at it as science fiction, ’cause that wasn’t going to happen, really.’ But Ronald saw it as science possibility. He came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys; so how was a colored boy from South Carolina – wearing glasses, never flew a plane – how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was one who didn’t accept societal norms as being his norm, you know? That was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise.”____









