Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more than a celebration of a man who fought for worker and civil rights.
After he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, King’s words and peaceful protests became a blueprint for rights activists for decades to follow.
In Las Vegas, Ruby Duncan, now in her 80s, took the mantra of peaceful protests to the streets of Las Vegas — to the Strip, in fact — as she fought draconian cuts in those who needed federal assistance in the 1980s.
In 2020, activists took to the streets — again, the Las Vegas Strip in addition to other parts of the city — to protest misconduct by police following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
And in Las Vegas, activists and community leaders helped preserve landmarks to both the discrimination against African Americans and the growth in their numbers and their migration to Las Vegas’ Historic Westside.
In commemoration of MLK Jr. Day, State of Nevada is re-airing discussions from recent years with Duncan, Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV, and those who helped lead vigils and protests during that turbulent summer of 2020.
