There’s more to black history in this Valley than the Moulin Rouge’s 1955 opening, the Strip’s 1960 desegregation and O.J. Simpson’s dumbassery, as Claytee White, director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center, attests below.
• 1904: Establishment of McWilliams Township, modern-day West Las Vegas; the event occurs a year before the historic 1905 land auction credited with birthing Las Vegas.
• 1920s: Opening of the Valley’s first black church. Zion Methodist was located where the Binion’s garage stands today.
• 1924: Ku Klux Klan holds its first and only march in Vegas. “It was Downtown. They were recruiting throughout the state,” White says. “City leaders said the Klan would never march here again. And they haven’t.”
• 1928: Local NAACP branch debuts. Among its first battles is trying to get blacks to work on Hoover Dam.
• 1931: Hoover Dam construction begins. Over the course of its construction, only 40 of its 20,000 workers are black.
• 1931: Blacks start moving Downtown, near the post office on Stewart Street.
• Mid-1930s: Start of white flight from West Las Vegas. Blacks successfully petitioned the City Commission to live there.
• Early 1940s: Jackson Street (now Avenue) becomes the hub of black economic and social life, with hopping casinos, taverns, clubs and businesses.
• 1943: Lubertha Johnson becomes one of the Valley’s first black nurses.
• 1957: Debut of The Missile, a black newspaper seen as the precursor to the Las Vegas Sentinel-Voice, Nevada’s only black weekly newspaper.
• 1964 and 1967: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visits in 1964, meeting with then-mayor Oran Gragson. Three years later, he addresses the local NAACP during its Freedom Fund Banquet. Ida Gaines, a staffer for Sen. Harry Reid, was on hand and remembers being mesmerized my King’s eloquence. “I was honored to be there that day.”