HISTORIC BLACK VEGAS: How the Westside played a role in the integration of public accommodations

BY CLAYTEE D. WHITE

In 1960, Dr. James B. McMillan served as president of the local Las Vegas NAACP, Branch 1111. In March of that year, he received a letter from the organization’s national office in New York — encouraging branches nationwide to elevate activities that would lead to integration of public accommodations. McMillan, using that same mode of communication, sent a letter to Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson — demanding integration of the Strip and Downtown in two weeks. McMillan clearly stated that if integration did not occur, the Black community would march down the Strip on the Saturday evening of March 26, 1960. 

Community members began to meet and strategize. Negotiations went back and forth between elected officials, including the governor; owners of hotels, and leaders of the Black community. You all know how this story ends but was this the entire Las Vegas-based integration story? I argue that it was not. I assert that Las Vegas helped to integrate the entire nation. In order for the national NAACP to do its work, the organization needed money. There was never enough. In Las Vegas during these lean years, James “Jimmy” Gay was the first African American with a professional position on the Strip — at the Sands Hotel Casino. And Gay was the chairperson of the annual NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet. That’s the dinner that even today is the largest fundraiser held by branches nationally. 

Jimmy Gay was in a unique position. In the late 1940s he migrated to Las Vegas from Fordyce, Arkansas. Multi-talented Jimmy Gay was a great golfer; he taught and improved the game of many hotel executives up and down the Strip. And as chairman of the Branch’s largest fundraiser, he raised massive amounts of money for that era, selling banquet tables to those same executives. According to John Mance, a Californian who served on the national board of the NAACP, Las Vegas sent more funds to the national office than any other branch in the country. Isn’t it ironic that the broader fight against racial discrimination was aided by money from mafia bosses who did not want to integrate Las Vegas public accommodations? It’s somehow quite fitting that Las Vegas was the first city with an integrated hotel casino and that the city was integrated before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Money is power. Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr. were known avid supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. These were two of the many celebrities that King would call on when times were dire and money was needed for that next campaign push into another southern city — and whether for integrating lunch counters, voting rights, or schools, the money arrived on time. Belafonte and Davis did not curtail their Las Vegas engagements even though they were treated less than their white entertainment friends. They kept coming back because Las Vegas paid top dollar to entertainers. Then they donated millions of those dollars to the civil rights movement. 

Integrating Las Vegas’ public accommodations in 1960 led to the consent decree of 1971. In 1960, Blacks were allowed to spend their money on dining, shows, and gambling — but there were no “Black” jobs in that package. In 1971, the first Black attorney in Nevada filed a consent decree in federal court naming seventeen hotel casinos, five trade unions, and the Nevada Resorts Association, mandating that they hire African-Americans in jobs that covered a long list of positions in the gaming industry. That list included jobs as bartenders, dealers, cocktail waitresses and many others. Blacks began to enter mid-level management positions as well. 

The first Black attorney was Charles Kellar — sent to Nevada in 1959 by Thurgood Marshall, who worked at the national office of the NAACP before becoming the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Quid pro quo? Marshall and Kellar were friends, and maybe Marshall knew that Nevada needed a smart, flamboyant, bold, poised legal mind to make a difference in Nevada. And maybe it was time for the national office to make a payment back to Las Vegas for its many good deeds.