During the Strip’s earliest days, the budding resort city of Las Vegas was capable of compensating its stage stars with lavish hotel rooms and plentiful paychecks. But the experience for the Black entertainer was not the same.
“If you had shows to perform in a hotel, you couldn’t eat in that hotel. You couldn’t stay in that hotel,” said Claytee White, director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center and a Black woman who has lived in Las Vegas for over 30 years. “These Black entertainers took some of the first steps toward integrating the city.”
Sammy Davis, Jr. Nat King Cole. Pearl Bailey. Harry Belafonte. Count Basie. Josephine Baker. Johnny Mathis. Hazel Scott. They were a few of the dozens of pre-Civil Rights Movement-era Black entertainers who traveled abroad and gained international acclaim after facing pushback despite bringing in big bucks from dazzling domestic casino-goers.
“They were wanted here in Las Vegas because they were global attractions,” said White. “And this was becoming the entertainment capital of the world.”
Though integration would come to Las Vegas a little sooner than the rest of the nation, gaining equal rights for Blacks in Las Vegas, as well as Black entertainers and their supporters, required work and advocacy.
From Sammy Davis, Jr. aiding local efforts for equality to Josephine Baker’s unique contract agreements – just to prove a point –civil rights progress on the Strip was a collection of small victories too big to ignore. The primary work that led to the city’s integration, however, was done by the local branch of the NAACP.
We checked in with White for a look behind the curtain of the Black performers from Las Vegas’ past. How did entertainers create change? Who were the most influential? What role did Frank Sinatra play in all of this? Read on, and learn how they made a difference for the locals who live here to this day.
How did Las Vegas compare to the rest of the nation in terms of equality during the 1940-60s?
The reason we hear about racism so often in Las Vegas is because African American entertainers did not have wonderful places to stay. In Los Angeles and New York City, there were well-developed African American communities with nice hotels that welcomed them. But in Las Vegas, they only had some boarding houses.
But there was segregation all over the country. This was a national phenomenon. There was racism in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and any other city, town, or village in the country. That was the lay of the land and not unusual.
We can’t look at Las Vegas as a place that was unusual or unusually harsh because the whole country was segregated. Blacks who came to Las Vegas were already being discriminated against wherever they came from. It wasn’t as if they were going to come here and sit in restaurants with white people at the next table and go out in casinos with them. That wasn’t an expectation of Las Vegas. They didn’t have that in Atlanta, St. Louis, or any place else, so why would they have it here?
How were Black entertainers in Las Vegas treated differently?
One of the main differences is that they couldn’t eat or stay in the hotels where they were performing. And there was only one restaurant on the Strip, called Foxy’s, that allowed African Americans inside to eat.
Sometimes they could eat by the swimming pool – they couldn’t go inside the pool, but they could sit near it and eat.
To get a full meal, a full night’s rest, or enjoy entertainment, they had to go to the Westside, a neighborhood that to this day is still home to a large portion of Las Vegas’ Black community.
When did Black entertainers become prominent in Las Vegas?
Sammy Davis, Jr. is one of the first, rising to fame in the late 1940s. He started entertaining here as part of the Will Mastin Trio, alongside the group’s namesake, Will Mastin, and his father, Sammy Davis, Sr. But a lot of lesser-known Black groups were entertaining at the same time. There were lots of smaller groups and early performances from folks such as Count Basie and Harry Belafonte.
In the late 1940s, as the Strip was just getting its legs underneath it with the first hotels, there weren’t many of any type of entertainers here at that point. It was not unusual for Black entertainers to be in Las Vegas well before integration.
Who or what was responsible for desegregation on the Strip?
Integration started because the Black community forced it. We can see changes as early as the 1920s and 30s – but what we see in the history books about integrating the Strip and downtown was a push that came from the Black community itself. We have people in the Black community starting to make waves from the late 1920s onward. A great push came from entertainers.
The entertainer-advocate you should know more than any other is Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s not unusual for us to see photos of Sammy Davis, Jr. speaking to a group in the Black community. And he helped the welfare rights women by participating in all of their protests.
Nat King Cole is one of the first entertainers on the Strip who is paid around $50,000 per week. He’s one of the first who is allowed to stay on the hotel property that he performed at, the Thunderbird. That comes before integration takes place.
And then we see Josephine Baker coming here in the early 1950s, and she had a residency for two weeks. She stays on the hotel property, and then she does something that no one else has thought about yet: Her contract requires that a couple of tables be reserved for her friends. So, the first thing that Baker does when she arrives in town is find the NAACP and tell the membership that she wants people to sit at her tables every night. And they helped her make that happen.
We also have the NAACP, itself, especially in 1960. It’s headed by the first African American dentist in Nevada, Dr. James McMillan. All NAACP chapters around the country received a letter from the national branch, which instructed them to increase their efforts toward integration. McMillan acted right away.
He wrote a letter to the mayor (Oran K. Gragson) which stated that if Las Vegas wasn’t integrated in two week’s time, there would be protests on the Strip on a Saturday night for all the world to see. That’s when the negotiations went back and forth between the city, the mob, and the Black community.
How did Josephine Baker have so much bargaining power?
Josephine Baker was a star in Paris, France, and part of the Free French underground resistance in WWII. When she came to America, she went across the country doing small things here and there to further integration in this country. This was because she knew what it meant to live as a free person in a country that didn’t discriminate against her.
Small victories like that did not change anything on their own, but they mounted up over the years. It wasn’t until 1960 when the Black community decided that they were going to have integration, or else they would organize marches on the Strip.
By this point, some hotel owners had already done things like paying Nat King Cole more than anybody else to entertain, and given entertainers trailers on the property so that they didn’t have to stay in boarding houses on the Westside.
Thanks to this succession of small steps over the years, no one was surprised when integration was finally achieved. Many hotel owners in Las Vegas had already begun cooperating with a lot of Black entertainers, and they were anticipating that this cooperation would be cemented by law.
What role did Frank Sinatra play in local civil rights?
We know that Frank Sinatra was a person who believed in equality and equity. All of his biographers talk about that and what he expected in his personal environment – and that he loved Sammy Davis, Jr. I believe that sincerely. However, it’s just not true that he integrated Las Vegas.
If we’re going to name anybody in the Rat Pack who helped with integration, equity, and fairness, it would be Sammy Davis Jr., whose efforts aren’t as widely known because he was quietly working behind the scenes. He didn’t do it for the headlines. He just did it because that’s the way he operated.
We see Sammy in the Black community helping in all kinds of situations, all kinds of movements. Not just the national Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr.; he is also supporting local civil rights efforts and women who protest against the inequities of the welfare system.
How important was money in integrating the Strip?
When you look at protests in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and when you look at those newsreels with people siccing dogs on protesters and using water hoses, you cannot allow something like that to happen in Las Vegas.
We are the entertainment capital of the world and were becoming that at the time. We had people coming here from all walks of life. They were coming here to have a great time, and the city could not be associated with the images coming out of the South.
I think integration occurred here in 1960 — sooner than in many other areas of the country — because of the money. Las Vegas hotel owners did not want to lose those kinds of dollars or wealth. They had to be careful to maintain the flow of money and civility – and they did.
How do you look back on that period of time in Las Vegas, and the influence Black entertainers had?
It gives me great pleasure to find little nuggets of history, such as Sammy Davis, Jr. owning 8%of the Tropicana in the early 1970s. Black entertainers did a lot for this city and for the local Black community because they had to become part of it.
If you were performing at the Sands for two weeks, that essentially meant you were spending two weeks in the Black community. Not only did they earn money and push against the restrictions of the Strip, but they were in those communities spending some of that money. I think there are a lot of ways that they helped the city become more progressive.
