Community leaders whose service helped shape the Historic Westside were honored Saturday at Westside Legacy Park, where new plaques featuring the names and images of the 2026 inductees were unveiled. Claytee White attended the event and emphasized the importance of preserving local history.

The words of the Moulin Rouge Agreement rang out as a reminder of Las Vegas’ pivotal step toward racial justice years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became the law of the land. The agreement marked the end of discriminatory policies that had barred Black residents from Las Vegas’ gleaming Strip casinos. On Wednesday, those gathered at the Harrison House commemorated the proclamation’s anniversary.

To help bring that history to life, Beals partnered with Claytee White, a longtime African American historian in Las Vegas and the founder of History in Living Color. White previously served as UNLV’s oral history director for more than two decades.

In 1953, Marble Manor became home to a growing number of Las Vegas residents at a time when adequate housing was scarce — especially for African-Americans who were barred from living in many parts of the city. What began as a necessary housing development soon became a cornerstone of community life on the Historic Westside. Now, as we prepare to launch an oral history project and documentary chronicling Marble Manor’s legacy, we are asking for your help.

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

One of this work’s main contributions is the analysis of the relationship between a difficult past and a tourism-oriented future, heard in the voices of those who are often ignored but directly affected by planning strategies and policies.

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.