Turning point: Las Vegas’ struggle for racial desegregation started 41 years ago

Friday, March 23, 2001 | 10:58 a.m.

Four decades ago, it took the efforts of blacks and whites working together to end segregation practices that prohibited blacks from staying in Las Vegas Strip hotels.

As Katherine Duncan, the organizer of the recognition of the 41st anniversary of Strip desegregation prepares for Sunday's 3 p.m. ceremony at the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society, she marvels at the number of white comrades in the cause.

"This shows that desegregation has worked and continues to work, though we have a long way to go," said Duncan of the African-American Cultural Society, which is hosting the event commemorating the March 25, 1960, agreement that allowed blacks to stay as guests in local hotels and have access to all hotel facilities.

Forty-one years ago this weekend, such white community figures as Gov. Grant Sawyer, Sheriff Butch Leypoldt and Sun Publisher Hank Greenspun joined numerous black leaders in a "war room" at the Moulin Rouge, the first interracial casino in the United States, and mapped out plans that would change the course of local history.

The plan Greenspun proposed called for him and other prominent whites to secure promises from major Strip resorts to cease the racist practice of banning blacks as guests in exchange for black leaders calling off their planned march down the Strip.

Sawyer, Leypoldt and Greenspun are gone. But new white faces have emerged to take their place in the struggle to assure that blacks are equally treated in Las Vegas.

They include Bart Maybie, who four years ago bought the Moulin Rouge as it faced the wrecking ball and this past week pulled the permits that he hopes will result in its reopening in October. The Moulin Rouge is sponsoring Sunday's event.

"I come from Canada where things are a little different and race is not as big an issue," said Maybie, who has renovated about 600 units in predominantly black West Las Vegas, spending $15 million in the process.

"When I saw that they planned to tear down the Moulin Rouge, I thought it was a crime. I wanted to do something about it, given the history of this place."

On Sunday, Maybie will reveal plans for the Moulin Rouge Museum and Cultural Center adjacent to the West Bonanza Avenue club. An organizational committee for that project is headed by former FBI agent Steve Rybar, who also is white.

Rybar, who today is a private investigator, said more whites must do their part toward the goal of achieving racial harmony.

"The history of West Las Vegas and desegregation is not just black history. It is the history off the whole city. It spans the entire development of Las Vegas, black and white."

Planned exhibits at the museum will include several black entertainment figures, including the Platters, the opening act at the Moulin Rouge on the opening night of May 24, 1955. Jean Bennett, longtime coordinator of the singing group, is helping to make the dream of a topflight Moulin Rouge museum a reality.

Bennett, president of the Five Platters Inc., and one of the first women executives in the music industry, came to Las Vegas in 1954, two years after helping the late Buck Ram, her business partner, put together the Platters.

"The entertainment history plays a big role in black history and desegregation because music is something that ties people of different races together," Bennett said, who is white. "Music knows no color and has no barriers.

"But, as big as the Platters ("Only You," "The Great Pretender" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes") were in the United States, they were much bigger internationally because they did not have to deal over there with racial prejudices that existed here."

Bennett said, however, the Platters had success performing before predominantly white U.S. audiences because whites could relate to their sound.

Duncan said the main reason the milestone 40th anniversary of desegregation went by last year without public recognition is because of the lack of strong sponsorship of a major backer like the Moulin Rouge. Nine years ago, the African-American Cultural Society helped get the club on the National Register of Historic Places.

"We have achieved our greatest success every time we have joined forces with the Moulin Rouge," Duncan said.

To help the Moulin Rouge return to prominence, Maybie and his CBC Financial Corp., has bought all of the surrounding properties including Treeline Park, Desert Breeze I and II and Desert Garden Town Homes, which are being renovated and rented out.

"You can see that desegregation is working in these apartments because I'd say about a third of the tenants are white, where 10 years ago that would not have been the case in this part of town," Maybie said.

Restoring the Moulin Rouge will not be as easy, as it will be a historical renovation, meaning that Maybie can use only the type of materials that existed in the 1950s except in bathrooms and in places that require modern handicapped access fixtures.

Duncan says that while the Moulin Rouge must rely on materials from the past for its attempted return to glory, modern ideas are needed to achieve what has not yet been fulfilled under the promise of desegregation.

"Today the local branch of the NAACP is battling for larger numbers of minority contracts from the Strip hotels and Blacks In Gaming is concentrating on obtaining management level opportunities," Duncan said, noting that there are not a lot of black pit bosses or other black executives in Las Vegas resorts.

"We want community leaders to come out Sunday to reaffirm their commitment to the promise that was made 41 years ago advocating equality for everyone."

Today, about 6 percent of visitors to Las Vegas are black, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which actively markets for African-American conventions by advertising in Ebony and Black Enterprise magazines and on the American Urban Radio Network.

From 1930-60, local blacks were subjected to restrictions that rivaled the worst conditions in the deep South. A story in the March 1954 edition of Ebony, entitled "Negroes can't win in Las Vegas," told of the segregation practices and led to Nevada being labeled "The Mississippi of the West."

Black artists had to stay in run-down West Las Vegas boarding houses because they were banned from staying in the very resorts where they performed. By 1960, in the early days of the American civil rights movement, things were ripe for change. In his front-page "Where I Stand" column, Greenspun called for an end to segregation and made a plea for understanding between the races.

Following the March 25, 1960, meeting at the Moulin Rouge, general managers of several hotels, including the Desert Inn, Stardust and Tropicana, accepted Greenspun's plan, marking the beginning of the end of desegregation on the Strip.

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