No, I'm not going to the expected Martin Luther King, Jr. thing, because ya'll already know. I'm going to go with my favorite piece of pop culture as the segue into what I want to say:
The major hat tip for this post goes to FanBoy.com's post "How Star Trek Culturally Prototyped the 21st Century." Yeah, people always talked about the show have been "ahead of its time" to the point that to describe the show this way has become almost cliche. And I've already talked about Star Trek a lot on this blog as well.
But as the inauguration passes me, and I do my occasional re-watches of old Trek, I am continuously reminded of how far we've come. And to insist on putting an ostensibly Russian character on the bridge in the middle of the Cold War, a black woman, and an Asian American on TV screens back then, along with a "devil-eared" alien -- talk about visualizing WAY past anything anyone would have ever thought possible at the time.
[Source: Fanboy.com]
No wonder Martin Luther King, Jr., when hearing from Nichelle Nichols that she was planning to hear the show, asked her to stay on because Star Trek was the only show he let his own children watch on TV. And that speaks volumes.
