Civil rights tour ends in Las Vegas today

Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004 | 11:13 a.m.

Sitting on a couch in a Las Vegas living room surrounded by dozens of photos of presidents, performers and civil rights leaders from the last 60 years, 88-year-old Prince Spencer sighed.

"It was sort of frustrating," he said, recalling the decades he and three fellow tap dancers who called themselves the Four Step Brothers opened for Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Milton Berle and others.

"They applauded you on the stage like they're seeing you in a movie," he said.

"Then I'd come off the stage and they didn't want to know me."

In Las Vegas, he would come off stages in the Strip's biggest casinos and have to eat in the dressing room, and then sleep in boarding houses on the West Side.

Now he goes to worship at the Second Baptist Church at 500 Madison Ave., and passes by those same boarding houses, and those days come back.

"I can't forget," he said. "It's like being out of jail."

Spencer and more than 3,000 others across the country are trying to ensure that no one forgets the struggle to gain equal rights for blacks in America by getting their stories written down for a project called "Voices of Civil Rights," a bus tour that ends in Las Vegas today.

The project is sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons, which has its annual conference at the Sands Convention Center this week, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Library of Congress.

The stories -- including Spencer's, if he can make it to the Sands today, his wife Jeraldyn said ("He gets kind of tired," she explained) -- will wind up in the Library of Congress, with a selection offered at www.voicesofcivilrights.org.

The former dancer keeps himself busy, Jeraldyn said, by working 20 hours a week as a host at the Silver Nugget -- a job he couldn't have held when he began performing in Las Vegas in the 1950's.

He said he sees young black people today and thinks they take for granted the struggles of his generation.

"They don't know what we did to get there," he said.

The Spencer home since 1975 near Tropicana Avenue and Sandhill Road is testimony to the cultural contribution the Four Step Brothers made to modern times, with framed birthday greetings from Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, photos of hugs with Sammy Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. ("He loved my cooking," Jeraldyn mentioned), poses with the Rat Pack and many more.

And sometimes it was with the help of some of his white performers that "we broke down a lot of barriers," Spencer said.

He recalled the time Jerry Lewis insisted the Four Step Brothers be allowed to eat at the Sands if they were going on stage there.

And Milton Berle said he wouldn't appear on a television show in the 50's if Spencer and his fellow dancers weren't allowed to perform with him.

And the four men were the first blacks to perform in New York's Radio City Hall, Paris' Lido and Miami's Copa Beach, Spencer said.

But Spencer can still see in his mind's eye the sign on a building in Florida that said: "No niggers, no Jews, no dogs."

How did he live through it all?

"Dancing. I would stomp it out, beat out my frustration," he said.

"Then, when they applauded, I would take a deep and long and good bow -- and know I'd have to be myself after.

"But I was free when I was on the stage."