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Civil Rights Act

Civil Rights Act
Cecil Stoughton/White House Press Office

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.

Some of you listening to this may have seen the film Selma. It depicted Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders in the fight for voting rights. The violence that took place at Selma helped lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Parts of the film were controversial: historians objected to how it depicted President Lyndon Johnson as less supportive of civil rights than he actually was.

The national civil rights movement didn’t just begin with the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the March on Washington, of course. African Americans had been seeking their constitutional rights for generations, with other Americans helping or hindering them. Similarly, Nevada’s African American population had faced ample discrimination and segregation. Perhaps the most famous examples involved performers on the Strip who weren’t allowed to stay at the hotels where they entertained. Sammy Davis Junior recalled performing on the Strip and then having to stay at a boardinghouse in West Las Vegas, then going to a downtown movie theater and being told to change his seat.

But it was even tougher for Nevada’s less famous African American residents. They were segregated into West Las Vegas and Reno’s Lake-Evans block. During World War II, an African American woman assigned to the Hawthorne Naval Ammunition Depot was sent to the jail for lodgings because there was no place else to stay, supposedly.

Some Nevada politicians tried to change that. Longtime Las Vegas attorney George Rudiak introduced a civil rights bill at the 1953 legislature, but it went nowhere. Other lawmakers pushed for action and failed. In 1958, Grant Sawyer was elected governor and Roger D. Foley attorney general, and both of them advocated civil rights. Sawyer pushed through the creation of the Nevada Equal Rights Commission in 1961, but the heavily rural, conservative state senate was able to take away a lot of the power Sawyer wanted to give it.

Meanwhile, African Americans, especially in Las Vegas and Reno, started pushing harder and harder for civil rights. In both towns, African Americans started community newspapers to pay more attention to civil rights issues. In Reno, Eddie Scott lobbied so hard that he became known as Bulldog Eddie. In Las Vegas, Doctor Charles West, dentist James McMillan, and media personalities Bob Bailey and Alice Key, among others, joined a group of longtime residents that included Mabel and David Hoggard, Lubertha Johnson, and Woodrow Wilson … to list a few is to ignore too many, but there was strong leadership in West Las Vegas, and those leaders engaged in political action and economic boycotts. Their efforts culminated in the Moulin Rouge Agreement of March 1960, to allow African Americans to patronize most Strip and downtown casinos. There would be threats of marches and boycotts, negotiations, and some progress.

Nationally, the civil rights movement, and the southern reaction to it, helped inspire a push for legislation. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and barred a variety of forms of discrimination involving interstate commerce. It also prohibited state governments from denying access to public facilities on the grounds of race, color, religion or national origin. But how far did it reach? Would states need to pass similar legislation? Nevada acted, and we’ll tell you about it next time.

Nevada Yesterdays is written by Associate Professor Michael Green of UNLV, and narrated by former Senator Richard Bryan. Supported by Nevada Humanities