Star Trek’s Uhura Featured on DUST’s YouTube Series Afrofuturism

Gunpowder & Sky’s DUST, a multi-platform destination for sci-fi content, last week premiered its Afrofuturism series in celebration of Black History Month. The series (you can see the first episode below) examines the history of black characters in science fiction.

This week, the series’ second episode, titled “Afrofuturism: Uhura,” premiered with a brief look at the history of the Star Trek character by the same name.

Here’s the official synopsis for the Uhura episode, which you can find at the DUST YouTube channel:

In “Afrofuturism: Uhura”, DUST tells the story of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, a commander aboard Star Trek‘s Starship Enterprise. When Uhura was introduced to American audiences, Lyndon B. Johnson was president, racial tension was reaching critical mass, Muhammad Ali refused to serve in the Vietnam War, and the Beatles told the press they were bigger than Jesus.

At the same time, three black women were hard at work at NASA building out the mathematical equations that would help the U.S.A. win the space race. A story that was recently told in the box office success: Hidden Figures.

Guided by the voice of Little Simz, with Joyce Wrice & Kay Franklin’s “Rocket Science” as the soundtrack, watch as DUST imagines Uhura beaming up Sun Ra, Martin Luther King, and astronaut Mae Jemison onto the Enterprise.

It was King who convinced Nichols to stay on Star Trek after the first season. According to Nichols’ own interviews, King told her, “You are our image of where we’re going. You are 300 years from now.”

Nichols would go on to appear in 66 episodes of Star Trek and the 6 original series films, but it would take nearly 30 years from her 1966 debut for a black woman to make it to space in real life: In 1992, Mae Jemison became a real-life Uhura aboard the NASA spaceshuttle Endeavor, and would go on to make a cameo appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

You can subscribe to DUST here; new episodes of Afrofuturism will debut throughout February. For the pilot, DUST worked with Monica Ahanonu of DreamWorks Animation, while episodes two through five were done in conjunction with with a team of six students from OTIS College of Art and Design. The team goes by the name Virtual Cocktail, and is led by Daveion Thompson.