When Ruby Duncan died, you found her obituaries all over the media here. That doesn’t often happen anymore, especially when the person in question never held a public office. But Ruby Duncan was a force for change who made a big difference in Nevada … and elsewhere.
She was born in 1932 in Tallulah, Louisiana, a town important to our history. Some of the first Black workers on Hoover Dam’s construction came from there, including Duncan’s uncle. During World War II, Basic Magnesium recruited Black workers from Tallulah for the wartime plant in what became the city of Henderson. She didn’t come here then. Her parents died young, as she put it, “they say from overwork.” When they died, she was too young to remember them. She grew up remembering that if she didn’t pick enough cotton, she would be beaten. She said, “The only time I saw white people was when they was riding up and down on horses in the cotton patch, screaming at us.”
Ruby Duncan had to quit school when she was fourteen to work full-time. Until then, she went to school only part-time, the four months each year she didn’t have to pick cotton with other sharecroppers at the Ivory Plantation. When she did go to school, she had to walk eight miles to get there. When her uncle helped found a local NAACP chapter, night riders came to their home, torches lit. She hid. She survived that, and being raped, and moved into town. In 1952, she followed other Black women who had been sharecroppers in migrating to Las Vegas. She was hoping for something better.
It was at least a little better. As another migrant, Lucille Bryant, put it, “Eight dollars a day and working in the shade.” But a couple of years after Duncan arrived with her second child, Las Vegas was nicknamed the Mississippi of the West for its racial segregation. Her aunt and older son were living in a motel in the Whitney area. The family bathed in a stream running behind it. One day, Nevada Test Site officials came by to tell them the water was contaminated.
Duncan went to work. She cooked and cleaned for comedian Hank Henry, then at some hotels and motels, including the Flamingo. In 1956, she met a local Culinary leader, a Black woman, Sarah Hughes. Duncan joined the union. When her supervisor ordered her to work overtime, she refused and was fired. The union got her job back. She kept working but married a Nellis airman who mustered out and worked two jobs to support the family, which now included seven children. When he became abusive, she divorced him and went to work at the Sahara Hotel. She worked in the kitchen. She loved it.
Then one day she fell and suffered spinal damage. She had to go on welfare, and hated it. She couldn’t get a job and told her story to Las Vegas Sun reporter Mary Manning, who published it. Duncan was not alone. Other Black women in West Las Vegas found themselves stuck in the system, and didn’t like how the system worked. Ruby Duncan would be one of the ones to fight to change it.
