Bonkers as it might sound, this story comes straight from Nichols herself, who graced fans with a Reddit AMA back in 2015. Asked about a rumor that Dr. King had convinced her to stay on the Enterprise, the then-85-year-old performer took the opportunity to set the record straight. “This is true,” she wrote. “I had several conversations with him over the years, and it sounds like the stories have gotten mixed and confused. I was offered a role on Broadway … I was ready to leave ‘Star Trek’ and pursue what I’d always wanted to do.”
Then came the twist: “Dr. Martin Luther King, quite some time after I’d first met him, approached me and said something along the lines of ‘Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have become [a] symbol. If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde haired white girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you’ve accomplished, for all of us, will only be real if you stay.'”
Understandably, this talk gave Nichols pause. She began to consider the ramifications of her departure, and how wide-ranging they might be. In the end, she decided to stay. Nichols would go on to appear in “Star Trek” projects for decades to come, even appearing posthumously via archived audio in “Kobayashi,” a 2022 episode of “Star Trek: Prodigy.”
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