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The answer to the question about the Holy Cow (QoD 3/16/18) mentioned that a previous incarnation at that location was the first integrated restaurant on the Strip. This piqued my curiosity. I didn't know that, in the 1950s, racial segregation existed to a great extent outside of the South. I'm interested in hearing about the racial situation that existed in Vegas back then and I'd be especially interested in hearing from or about African-Americans who were living in Vegas during those times.
Las Vegas was so segregated that, even well into the 1960s, it was known as “the Mississippi of the West.”
In a way, Las Vegas was predestined to be segregated, as it had its origins in two rival developments that were literally on the other side of the tracks from each other. What is now the Westside neighborhood and the heart of the African-American community, began as the McWilliams Townsite, a development planned by J.T. McWilliams, a surveyor and civil engineer in the intermountain west around the turn of the 20th century. When it became evident in 1902 that a railroad depot would go up near Big Springs in central Las Vegas Valley, McWilliams and the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad began developing rival town plans. The railroad, however, held all the cards: It owned the water. The residents of McWilliams’ Townsite who could moved to the east side, sometimes taking their houses — mounted on skids — with them. The poorer folk had to stay on the west side of the tracks, where dirt streets ran past tents, shanties and outhouses.
Las Vegas’ earliest black residents tended to be railroad porters or repair-yard workers, scratching out a living in the dusty railroad town. The railroad's water czar, Walter Bracken, while not explicitly tacitly them out of the better neighborhoods, implicitly forced blacks to fill out the ranks of the old McWilliams' Townsite, just off downtown. In case anybody didn’t get the message, the Ku Klux Klan held a march in Las Vegas in 1925. Still, construction of Hoover Dam and the federal courthouse brought many African-Americans to the new boomtown in search of opportunity in the midst of the Great Depression. Likewise, during World War II, munitions production at Basic Magnesium attracted workers from the South.
City officials continued to implement red-line policies to segregate the African-American community to Westside. For example, they issued licenses for black businessowners only in Westside.
Vagrancy laws were another case in point.
“Aunt Magnolia used to tell me that if an unemployed black person was caught walking on Las Vegas streets, the police could arrest him and put him to work on a chain gang,” says historian Trish Geran. “Many of her friends were arrested, because they couldn't get jobs, because no one was hiring blacks.”
As it evolved from a railroad and dam-construction to a casino town, the whites-only policies continued to evolve.
“It was, after all, a town built on tourism,” writes academic Rosemary Pearce, “and to allow blacks in was to affront white tourists from strictly segregated regions. That many hotels were owned by organized-crime bosses may also have made black performers think twice about protesting Jim Crow policies for fear of violent repercussions.”
For instance, when Harry Belafonte was playing the Thunderbird in 1952 and forced to leave and enter by a back door, he tried to buy out his contract. He was told the only way he could get out of Vegas, if he persisted, was “in a box.”
We’ll pick it up from here in tomorrow’s installment of the “Mississippi of the West.”