When a kiss is not just a kiss

For decades the first televised inter-racial kiss was thought to be between Capt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura during the third season of Star Trek. The 1968 episode was Plato's Stepchildren, where a group of Platonians have fun with the captain and crew, forcing them to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do. In this sense, Kirk and Uhura were literally powerless to resist the temptation, no matter how great it was. It seemed both got into the role.

Well, it turns out BBC beat NBC to the punch with a more friendly kiss between a black man and a white woman in a play that focused on an inter-racial relationship called You in Your Small Corner (1962). Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) dealt with a similar theme, but didn't go so far as to bring Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton to lock lips. Too bad as they would have at least pre-dated the notorious Star Trek episode.

Miscegenation laws made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner a risky affair. The Motion Picture Production Code explicitly forbid such relationships shown in movies, so the producers and Stanley Kramer had to walk gingerly around the topic. It helped having a star-studded cast to support the highly-respected Sidney Poitier, who had risen to fame with Lilies of the Field and To Sir, with Love. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn played liberal white parents who found their political stances tested by their free-spirited daughter, delightfully played by Katharine Houghton.

Another missed opportunity was No Strings, a Tony-award winning stage production that featured Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley, which first premiered in 1962. However, the idea that Diahann was black never figured into the story or the music. The winsome actress played a model born "north of Central Park." Diahann Carroll would go onto have a great career, including a beloved television show, Julia, which ran from 1968-71, but the main love in her life was her little boy.

I suppose if one dug through the film and stage archives, one could find something from before the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code that saw an inter-racial relationship, however fleeting. After all, the Bard of Avon explored the subject long ago in Othello. But, such productions would have white actors in black face. Similarly the inter-racial romances between Whites and Indians tended to be between persons of the same color pretending to be opposites.

There was the suggestion of such an inter-racial relationship in Imitation of Life (1934) between a mixed-race daughter of a housekeeper and a white suitor, but no kiss. The film deserves a lot of credit though for exploring the subject of what it was like for a light-skinned black woman in a deeply segregated society, with Fredi Washington as Peola.

We look back at these films and television shows with nostalgia and humor, as such barriers only exist in persons' minds these days. Still, Spike Lee raised some hackles as things got hot and heavy between Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra in Jungle Fever.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

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''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

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Dispatches from Vilnius

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