Nichelle Nichols

“As I soon learned, this was the dream to which Gene had alluded so often in the past. Interestingly, though he’d said many times before that there might be something in this for me, that day I won a part that had yet to be created. It was only after I’d been brought on board, and Gene and I conceived and created her, that Uhura was born. Many times through the years I’ve referred to Uhura as my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the twenty-third century. Gene and I agreed that she would be a citizen of the United States of Africa. And her name, Uhura, is derived from Uhuru, which is Swahili for “freedom.” According to the “biography” Gene and I developed for my character, Uhura was far more than an intergalactic telephone operator. As head of Communications, she commanded a corps of largely unseen communications technicians, linguists, and other specialists who worked in the bowels of the Enterprise, in the “comm-center.” A linguistics scholar and a top graduate of Starfleet Academy, she was a protégée of Mr. Spock, whom she admired for his daring, his intelligence, his stoicism, and especially his logic. We even had outlined exactly where Uhura had grown up, who her parents were, and why she had been chosen over other candidates for the Enterprise’s five-year mission.”
― Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories