Part 2 of Segregated Las Vegas
The more hysterical manifestations of anti-black sentiment took place on the Las Vegas Strip.
Nat King Cole was under orders not to make eye contact with the white women in his audiences and when he tried to enter the casino where he was performing by the front door, he was barred. After the N-word was used on Willie Mays, while escorting him out of a casino, the security guard explained to a newspaper reporter, “Las Vegas is the South and it’s what customers want.”
For all the money they made for the affluent whites who controlled the Strip, entertainers like Cole, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong weren't considered different in any way than the African-Americans who worked back-of the-house jobs, such as maids, janitors, and dishwashers, out of sight of the lily-white guests. One notable exception was when Josephine Baker played the El Rancho. Her contract specifically stipulated that she would perform only in front of integrated audiences and she staged a one-woman sit-in, right in front of the all-white audience, until management relented and allowed black ticket holders to enter. Baker won, but it was a lonely victory.
Black entertainers weren’t entitled to dressing rooms, so they’d have to arrive in costume and makeup. As Sammy Davis, Jr., put it: “In Vegas for twenty minutes, our skin had no color. The second we stepped off the stage, we were colored again. The other acts could gamble or sit in the lounge and have a drink, but we had to leave through the kitchen with the garbage." Even the superstar entertainers had to stay in boarding houses in Westside.
Frank Sinatra was known for crossing the “color line” from New York to Palm Springs on behalf of Sammy and other black performers and he did so in Vegas. Right after the election of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States, the Rat Pack was performing in the Copa Room at the Sands and Sinatra went to Sands management and said, “If Sammy isn’t allowed to walk in the front door, mingle with me and the audience, and eat and sleep in this hotel, we’ll never perform here again and I’ll personally ask all my performer friends to boycott this joint.” The color barrier in Las Vegas, at least for performers, was finally broken.
However, the rest of the segregated city had a long way to go. In one of the few codified examples of segregation, in 1958 the Las Vegas City Council enacted an ordinance forbidding blacks from dealing casino games. This met with immediate pushback from then-Gov. Grant Sawyer, who appointed Clarence Ray as one of the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s first inspectors and the first black inspector. Ray went on to open the only dealer school that would train African-Americans.
Another Sawyer appointee, Bob Bailey, chaired a commission authorized by the 1961 legislature to discover whether discrimination existed in Nevada. He himself was discriminated against in Carson City, where hotels and restaurants wouldn’t serve him. But he was able to open a public dialogue about why there were no black bellmen, desk clerks, or waiters in Vegas. “Their position was nobody black is qualified and it made them look ridiculous,” Bailey explained. “We said, ‘Blacks have been waiting on white people and carrying their baggage a hundred years and we’re not qualified?’”
Ironically, many homes in Las Vegas, especially celebrities’, were designed by the prominent African-American architect Paul Revere Williams.
Tune in tomorrow, when we cover from the Moulin Rouge (whose stage show is pictured below) to the present day.
