I was watching the programme about researching family history via DNA tonight. One guy was looking for his father, a US GI that had visited his mother during the war. He was one of about a quarter of a million black GIs that were stationed in the UK. He wondered why his father had not come back and taken his mother and him to the USA.
It was explained that his father came from Texas, and it would have been illegal for his father to marry his mother. His mother was white and his father was black – inter-racial marriage was illegal.
This week we can look back to the events of 7th March 1965 on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. I was thinking of posting an image, but they are all horrific. It is hard to believe that people were beaten unconscious, that police used home made weapons like rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire – in the so called land of the free. Just because people wanted to register to vote.
People from all over the USA joined together to protest as a result – eventually moving the world forward. Two years later the law preventing inter-racial marriage was dumped.
One year after this there was another act of defiance. It was the first inter-racial kiss on US television, between Captain Kirk and Uhura. Nichelle Nichols later described how there were multiple re-takes to try to get a shot where the lips didn’t touch, but the stars (both her and William Shatner) contrived to make sure the re-takes could not be used (making odd expressions, getting lines wrong etc).
Today there a conspiracy theorists trying to say this didn’t happen (really!). I can understand why racists want to do that. To me it is acts of defiance like this that helped remove racism, because it generated a new normal for me as a kid growing up, where race didn’t matter. It did the job – it changed the view of the world for those (like me) growing up at the time.
If you want to understand just how radical this was just look at the other popular TV shows from the USA from the 70’s and 80’s (particularly shows like the A-team where the lead “team” had different skin colours) and watch just how colour coordinated the love interests are.
Star Trek really did go where no USA show had gone before. So I take my hat off to the radical actors that flunked lines to make this a reality, in particular to Bill Shatner who demonstrated how to have fun fighting racism. It helps me realise just how important my small actions can be in creating a new new normal for the younger generations that will follow.