Historians say the contributions of Black women during that era helped shape the city’s cultural and economic identity.

The Moulin Rouge Agreement opened Strip casinos to Black patrons, but full workplace integration took more than a decade longer

The project is part of the HUNDRED Plan, an acronym for Historic Urban Neighborhood Design Redevelopment. In 2016, residents worked with graduate students from UNLV to create a vision for what they wanted to see on the Historic Westside.

During the segregation era, Black residents, workers, and entertainers were largely pushed off the Strip and into the Westside because of discriminatory housing and business practices that limited where they could live and gather, according to historians and oral histories preserved by UNLV and local museums. What could have been a story of isolation instead became one of creation. Block by block, the Westside developed its own ecosystem of hotels, restaurants, clubs, and gathering spaces that welcomed people the Strip shut out.

More than 70 years later, the low-income housing complex in the Historic Westside is being redeveloped, with the high-priced venture set to completely remake a pocket of a neighborhood once defined by segregation.

Next on the slate to curate an exhibition at the Civic Center Gallery are Las Vegas arts commissioner Carmen Beals and historian Claytee D. White, founding director of the Oral History Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Another future organizer is Las Vegas-based curator Heidi Straus, who curated the current exhibition The Choices of Man Through the Lens of the Holocaust (October 27, 2025–January 29, 2026) at the Clark County Government Center.

Prominent Black leaders like Woodrow Wilson (not the U.S. president) had to fight tooth and nail to have access to the legislative process. Wilson was Nevada’s first Black legislator who moved to Las Vegas in 1966, at the height of segregation, according to an oral history from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

As Las Vegas continues to grapple with food insecurity, one area non-profit is hoping to tackle the issues and provide residents in food deserts with fresh produce.

Oral History Research Center Director Claytee White shares stories people have told her over the years about Las Vegas and explains the importance of recording these memories for historical record.

Charles Kellar was a middle-aged New York attorney with a family, an established law practice and a portfolio of investment properties. But when Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the NAACP’s legal division, asked him to go to Nevada, he went, according to Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV.

When Nevada Assemblyman Woodrow Wilson went into a Carson City bar where fellow legislators “did their politicking” in the 1960s, they told the owner they wouldn’t continue patronizing the bar if Wilson, who was Black, was there. The bar owner told Wilson about the incident, and he learned the legislators were the same ones who had tried to buy him drinks and make him feel welcome.

UNLV'S Oral History Research Center is embarking on a project tracking the history of sports in Las Vegas. "It's kind of hard not to think about sports when you think about Las Vegas right now," said Oral History Research Center Project Manager Stefani Evans.