lucystillintheskywithdiamonds:
[Spock starts to play again. Uhura sighs deeply.]
UHURA: Mr. Spock, that music really gets to you.
SPOCK: Yes, I find it relaxing.
UHURA: Relaxing? It’s… I don’t know what to call it — but relaxing’s not the word.
SPOCK: Most interesting. I suppose it works differently on non-Vulcan nervous systems.
UHURA: I’d certainly like to learn how to play that.
SPOCK: I’d be glad to give you the theory. The mathematics are somewhat complex. To my knowledge, no non-Vulcan has eve mastered the skill.
You see, we Vulcans have natural rhythm.
UHURA (Uhura looks impressed)- Deleted scene from “Elaan of Troyius”
“if you remember Uhura was the only one he was able to teach the Vulcan lyre to and she sang and spooffed on Spock. Now, you could have never had a love scene in 63 between Uhura and Spock but there were several hints and Gene was one in the kind of beginning to follow that” - Nichelle Nichols
“Uhura” comes from the Swahili word UHURU meaning “freedom”. Uhura was pretty much the first ever black main character on American television who was not a maid or a domestic servant in 1966. TV network NBC refused to let Nichelle Nichols be a regular, claiming Deep South affiliates would be angered, so Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hired her as a “day worker,” but still included her in almost every episode. She actually made more money than any of the other actors through this workaround, and it was kept secret from the other actors, but it was still a humiliating second-class status. The network people made life hard for Nichols, constantly trying to pare down her screen time, purposefully dropping racist comments in her presence and even withholding her fan mail from her.This deplorable state of affairs led Nichols to make the decision to quit after the 1st season, but then she happened to meet the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who pleaded with her to stick with the show because as a Black woman she was portraying the first non-stereotypical role on television.
