6. Fighting for Equal Rights

Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960–1985

No 6
Fighting for Equal Rights

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schooling denied African Americans equal protection of the laws. A few years later, the federal government committed itself to the promise implicit in that ruling, and federal law and policy soon followed suit. A series of civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s erased legal bases for racial and gender discrimination in public accommodations and voting, and, most notably for this study, in employment. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the statutory centerpiece of the resulting efforts to achieve racial and gender equality in the latter area. The act not only prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and national origin in employment, but created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to fight such discrimination. Enforcement of the EEOC’s mandate was assigned to the U.S. Justice Department.

In the aftermath, the racial and sexual composition of workforces almost everywhere in the nation changed dramatically. In the Las Vegas resort industry, the EEOC investigated charges of worksite discrimination and used its findings to enable the Justice Department to enforce the new laws vigorously. The resulting transformation was not immediate or easy. Grass-roots movements led variously by black activists, political liberals, and proponents of women’s liberation as well as aggrieved workers pressured public officials to eliminate workplace discrimination throughout the 1960s and 1970s. With more insistency and verve than any government agency or bureaucrat, they also challenged employers and union leaders to end discriminatory practices. Exploring the resulting changes broadens and enriches our understanding of the social transformations these forces produced in Las Vegas resorts.

Federal policy and grass-roots activism worked together to recompose the workforce in no more than a decade and a half. Resort owners and unions had always agreed, without ever discussing it or considering it a problem, that women and minority men should be employed in certain jobs but not others in patterns that fit the presumed abilities of these groups as well as the unions’ and the resorts’ presumed interests. In the 1960s African Americans took the lead in challenging these attitudes and practices, and their accomplishments in Las Vegas tourism are integral parts of the history this study is endeavoring to recreate. Their struggles challenged the procedures, values, and expectations of unions and union leaders no less than those of resorts and their managers, and of workers themselves, whom those struggles sometimes pitted against each another. Ultimately, the reformers achieved what amounted to a fundamental social transformation in the industry and its workforce.¹

To suggest that reformers simply imposed their will on Las Vegas and its unions, however, would be naive. Resort owners and union leaders always shaped employment practices in the city, even when they had to do things neither of them were eager to do. As the civil rights movement gained momentum and muscle, both parties found ways to accommodate its demands without disrupting their operations. Though both initially opposed federally mandated affirmative action programs, they never posed as defenders of racial or sexual discrimination, or schemed after the 1960s to prevent women or minorities from finding jobs. While resort workers and managers may have indulged their prejudices, the workers never walked off the job or closed a resort to protest integration, and management never considered extreme measures to thwart enforcement of civil rights statutes. This is not to say that labor or management embraced enlightened racial and gender policies eagerly or voluntarily, but that the struggle for equality in Las Vegas tourism was less of a challenge than it was in manufacturing centers or service industries where jobs were scarce or even disappearing, or in areas of the Deep South where racialist attitudes were more rigid than those in Las Vegas tourism.

African Americans first appeared in Nevada in the nineteenth century, though their numbers remained small until industrial developments in the twentieth century opened jobs for laborers of all races. The Union Pacific Railroad Company brought the first sizable group of African Americans to Southern Nevada after 1900 to work as strikebreakers on railroad construction crews. When the construction ended, some of these men joined railroad maintenance crews stationed in Las Vegas and lived in company housing near the downtown rail depot. In the early 1930s a wave of African American migrants joined a much larger wave of whites moving into Southern Nevada to build Boulder Dam, though employers restricted blacks to menial and backbreaking tasks, thereby limiting black immigration. In 1935, when the dam was completed, African Americans constituted about 1 percent of the population of Clark County, fewer than two hundred people.²

That number jumped notably during World War II with the growth of magnesium mining south of Las Vegas. In the tight wartime labor market, processing magnesium, used in the production of ammunition and other war matériel, drew hundreds of African Americans to Clark County, most of them from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. By 1943 nearly three thousand blacks resided in the county, many of whom worked as “smutters” and “metalers” in the magnesium plants and lived in segregated company facilities nearby. Those in Las Vegas lived in the “colored section” across the railroad tracks from downtown.³

The Westside, as this area came to be known, was a shantytown inside a growing town. In the 1940s many residents there lived in tents or shacks, and even those in permanent dwellings generally lacked electricity, indoor plumbing, and running water. Westside had no fire hydrants, streetlights, or paved roads. “It was just a lot of sand and gravel,” one of its residents later remembered.⁴ Poverty and racial discrimination kept blacks as well as their community marginalized and stigmatized. Whites took the community’s physical and social degradation as proof that blacks were an economically improvident and socially undesirable element in the community. Bankers dismissed them as credit risks, and employers regarded them as fit only for menial housekeeping chores or outdoor tasks requiring brawn rather than knowledge or skill.⁵

The Westside was nonetheless a community with its own social and cultural life. “It was a neighborhood,” one resident recalled. “Everybody kind of knew everybody.”⁶ Its churches, civic associations, and grammar school provided opportunities for social identity and exchange. Black-owned businesses also operated in the Westside, including a few gaming establishments. Places like the Brown Derby, the Cotton Club, the Harlem Club, and El Morocco provided entertainment for Westsiders and black tourists, along with jobs for black bartenders, dealers, and others. The Westside also sported a wartime USO, which doubled as a hostelry for more than one thousand black soldiers a month who visited the city and no doubt patronized Westside businesses.⁷

As the war wound down, the Westside and its residents faced new challenges. In 1944, when victory in the war seemed certain, city officials launched a campaign to “clean up” the Westside, an early instance of the use of “urban renewal” to achieve “Negro removal.” City work crews bulldozed more than three hundred residential structures that failed to conform to city building codes. This transformed the housing shortage in the Westside into a crisis. To add to this crisis, a few months after the war the magnesium plant closed, throwing black and white workers alike out of jobs, but disproportionately impacting blacks. Many displaced workers moved away; others who remained looked for jobs in the growing resort industry. By the mid-1940s, resorts in and around Las Vegas employed several hundred African Americans, more or less all of them in menial labor. By the time the “Fabulous Flamingo” opened on the Strip in 1948, workers, though not supervisors, in the housekeeping departments at El Rancho, the Golden Nugget, and other new resorts consisted almost entirely of blacks.⁸

The experiences of Viola Johnson, who moved to Southern Nevada from rural Arkansas in 1942 at age twenty-one, mirrored those of many Westsiders in these years of hope, disappointment, and change. Johnson’s father and several other relatives were already working at the magnesium plant when she left Arkansas. Her mother washed dishes at El Rancho, one of the first resorts on the Strip. Newly arrived, Johnson moved into a Westside tent with six relatives, including her own child. The tent was perhaps ten by twelve feet, sufficient to cover a large bed and an oil-burning stove. Because the men in the family worked different shifts, they took turns sleeping in the bed. “When the swing shift go, then the day shift would go to bed,” Johnson recalled, “and when the swing shift come in, graveyard would be up, getting ready to go.”⁹ Johnson and her child slept outside “under the trees” in the cool desert night. Tents in the Westside were perhaps fifteen feet apart, and living conditions combined the difficulties of crowding with those of physical depravation. “Oh, my goodness, it was terrible,” Johnson remembered. “When we first came out here, it was so hot. I’m telling you, it was so hot.” And hot winds blew all over the place. “Sand, sand, sand, blow, oh the sand would blow everywhere.”¹⁰

Johnson’s situation soon improved. In 1943, she married, moved into a one-bedroom house, and found a job as a maid at the Flamingo, where she worked until she misplaced several room keys, for which she was fired. But housekeeping jobs were easy to find in the expanding industry, and Johnson was soon again employed. She worked “on and off” at the Sands for nearly a decade, years Johnson remembered fondly.¹¹ “I used to enjoy going to work,” she said of those years, “really, I enjoyed work.” Her standard of comparison was no doubt her earlier situation in rural Arkansas. Still, this positive perspective influenced her view of her circumstances. Johnson came to see her housekeeper’s job as a respite from her growing family responsibilities at home. “It was like getting away, I guess, getting away from home because I had kids at that time.”¹²

Though Johnson appreciated her job, she no doubt resented the racial discrimination that was integral to her circumstance. Resorts in the city hired blacks in low-paying jobs only and excluded them as guests, whatever their capacity to pay. Even well-known black entertainers who performed in premier resort showrooms had to find living accommodations in the Westside. Casinos in “white” establishments had no black dealers and admitted black gamblers only in designated areas, if at all. When admitted, blacks had to use segregated restrooms.¹³ Dance clubs, restaurants, and many shops in the city banned blacks altogether, while landlords outside the Westside refused to rent or sell to them. Some doctors and dentists refused to treat them, and public officials licensed them to operate businesses only inside the Westside. In the 1940s, in fact, the city forced the few black-owned businesses that had managed to surface downtown to close or relocate to the Westside.¹⁴

It was a wretched existence, and African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s had vivid memories of it and of personal instances of discrimination and humiliation: of being “shoo-ed out” of white-owned businesses, for example, or told not to touch merchandise. Those working in the resort industry recalled disrespectful treatment by white hotel guests. Timothy Wagner, a janitor at the Union Plaza, recalled being insulted by whites as he walked through downtown on the way to and from his job. “The people were so damn prejudice,” Wagner recalled. “I used to walk down the street and people would call me names.”¹⁵ Arlone Scott, a maid at the Last Frontier, recalled that employers, including her own, prohibited African Americans from entering casinos. “You wasn’t allowed into those casinos,” Scott said. “You could work in them, but you couldn’t gamble or go in for a meal or anything like that.”¹⁶

This exclusion reflected class as well as racial prejudice. Resorts like the Flamingo catered to high rollers and well-to-do tourists, not to slot machine players and penny-ante gamblers. In such resorts, where large sums of money changed hands regularly, managers viewed with suspicion anyone who looked hard-up, regardless of skin color. “They didn’t want anybody to come in the clubs that was poor,” a resident of the Westside remembered of these resorts, “and naturally most black people, they figured, was poor. … There wasn’t enough room to have all the people.”¹⁷

African Americans in Southern Nevada had always protested discrimination. During construction of the Hoover Dam, some of them formed the Colored Citizens’ Labor and Protective Association to protest hiring practices there, and the association continued to fight discrimination during and after the war. Local leaders like David Hoggard, Woodrow Wilson, and Lubertha Johnson played key roles in that fight and in efforts to strengthen the local branch of the NAACP. They also helped organize the Nevada Voters League and other groups to pressure political candidates to support their goals and agendas.¹⁸

During the late 1940s and 1950s, the efforts of civil rights groups in Nevada still centered in the Westside of Las Vegas, where the vast majority of the state’s African Americans lived. Community leaders supported a 1947 bill to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodations. Assemblyman E. R. “Boots” Miller (White Pine County) introduced the bill, which died in committee. Black leaders continued to back similar legislation through the 1950s with the same result. The Las Vegas NAACP tried to pressure social and business groups to support civil rights by boycotting the resorts, but without success. Efforts to convince the city to ban racial discrimination similarly failed. Officials steadfastly rejected such efforts as interference in the practices of private businesses. Nevada did form an advisory committee to the national Civil Rights Commission created in 1957, but state officials remained apathetic if not hostile to state civil rights legislation, and the commission was ineffectual.¹⁹

Despite these failures, black community activists had laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. By that time, the Las Vegas NAACP became more aggressive in the fight against discrimination. The effort had the blessings of Westside religious leaders, who used their pulpits to encourage it. The NAACP began working with liberal groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the League of Women Voters, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, whose voices strengthened the call for equality and justice. These awakenings created a stronger sense of racial consciousness and identity in the West-side and helped to galvanize the community and to pressure political and business leaders on behalf of civil rights legislation.

These efforts soon began to influence local and state politics. In 1958 Democrat Grant Sawyer upset Republican governor Charles Russell after embracing a liberal political agenda that included expressions of support for racial equality. According to Clarence Ray, an African American who worked for the Democratic Party at the time, civil rights leaders believed Sawyer would help break patterns of discrimination, and they campaigned on his behalf. “When Grant was elected,” Ray later explained, “we gave him eighty percent of the black votes down here, and he got about sixty percent up in Reno.”²⁰

After Sawyer’s support for civil rights proved lukewarm, James McMillan, head of the Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP, threatened protest marches against resorts unless officials acted to end racial discrimination. McMillan, a widely respected figure, had moved to Las Vegas in 1955. After his childhood in small-town Mississippi, he earned a degree in dentistry from the University of Detroit and served as an officer in the U.S. Army. He spoke out against racism and segregation in Las Vegas, winning praise from blacks as well as some whites, including Hank Green-spun of the Las Vegas Sun. Because of white inertia or opposition to his early efforts, McMillan turned to tactics of direct confrontation.²¹

Resort owners had always insisted that admitting black gamblers into casinos and black guests into hotels would turn white gamblers and guests away and thus damage the city’s resort industry. They used that argument to block state civil rights legislation. Yet the growing effectiveness of civil rights demonstrations across the country and McMillan’s threatened march in 1960 led them to reconsider their position. They agreed among themselves to desegregate Strip hotels, announcing the decision at the Moulin Rouge, a new, desegregated resort on the Westside, where black and white workers and customers already mingled. Owners also agreed to support the newly created Nevada Equal Rights Commission, which promised to investigate discriminatory practices in employment and public accommodations in the state and keep the public informed of civil rights issues. The mayor promised to hire more African Americans in city government and to get local banks to make more credit available to them.²²

These moves had modest results. In the early 1960s, while Martin Luther King Jr. and others protested racial discrimination in the South, Westside leaders protested Las Vegas discrimination. Reverend Prentiss Walker complained to the state’s Equal Rights Commission that “unwritten laws” in the housing market kept him from buying a home in most city neighborhoods. Moreover, some resorts refused to desegregate their hotels and casinos, telling blacks they had no vacancies, while others admitted limited numbers of blacks but charged them higher prices than whites.²³

Reverend Donald Clark was one of the Westside’s most active advocates of desegregation. Having moved to Las Vegas from the South ten years earlier, in 1961 he became president of the local NAACP. Clark frequently wrote letters to newspapers calling attention to discrimination. “Don’t you think it is strange,” he asked, “that there isn’t a Negro of any stature whatsoever in any employment in the City of Las Vegas? Don’t you think it peculiar?”²⁴

In 1962, when blacks were nearly 10 percent of the population of Clark County, Clark criticized Governor Sawyer and other state and local officials for ignoring discrimination in the resort industry. “Governor Sawyer is narrating a story and depicting Nevada as a mecca,” Clark said. “He wants all the tourists and conventions that will come, he wants industry to come, but in the industries already here 17,000 of the citizens already living here are deprived of even the opportunity to apply for a job.”²⁵ Clark also criticized legislators for not giving the Equal Rights Commission the resources necessary to accomplish its goals. The commission had only two of the authorized five members in 1962 and its budget was an inconsequential $2,500.²⁶

Like civil rights leaders elsewhere, Clark framed his critiques in the language of democracy and Christianity, calling the NAACP cause “righteous.” The association “has an obligation to bring to public officials the need for implementing democratic principles with democratic practice,” he said, urging officials to “do the unpopular thing and try to bring democracy where none exists.”²⁷ A year later Clark intensified his rhetoric, accusing the state gaming commissioner of doing “nothing” to end discrimination in casinos. “If you don’t believe in the equality of all citizens under the Constitution which you swore to uphold,” Clark told the commissioners, “then you shouldn’t be a commissioner.”²⁸

Other activists used similar language, among them Charles Kellar, an especially important figure in the local struggle for civil rights. Kellar had come to Las Vegas vowing to battle racial discrimination, and his presence added momentum to the civil rights struggle. His background explained his commitment. His mother had been a servant in the home of a wealthy black planter in the West Indies. Although the planter fathered Kellar and his siblings out of wedlock, he never acknowledged his paternity. As a young man, Kellar worked as a probation officer in New York City, where he witnessed widespread discrimination in the court system. “I saw that blacks could not find persons to represent them, so I decided to do it,” he later recalled. Kellar enrolled in a New York law school and worked for a firm that sued people for violating civil rights laws. His work drew the attention of Thurgood Marshall, who then headed the NAACP legal division. In the late 1950s Marshall asked Kellar and other black lawyers to establish residency in places where African Americans lacked adequate legal assistance. By 1960 Kellar was practicing law in Las Vegas.²⁹

He was not welcomed by whites. When he tried to deposit a large check at a bank in the city shortly after his arrival, bank officials called the police. “They assumed a black man with that much money had to be an escaped felon,” Kellar explained. A year later, in Reno to take the bar exam, the hotel at which he had reservations refused to admit him. Kellar took the exam, but examiners refused to publish the results, charging that he had cheated. It took four years and a ruling from the state supreme court for Kellar to gain admission to the Nevada bar. In the meantime, he worked as legal adviser to the Las Vegas NAACP, attacking discriminatory housing practices and a zoning system that confined African American students to schools in West Las Vegas. Kellar’s experiences explain why he and other civil rights advocates considered Nevada “the Mississippi of the West.”³⁰

Kellar and other black leaders met with Governor Sawyer in 1962 to protest the slow pace of change. At the meeting, Sawyer found himself under sharp attack for failing to match his words with deeds. Black leaders urged the governor to intervene personally to improve job opportunities for African Americans in the resort industry, if necessary by revoking the gambling licenses of establishments that continued discriminatory hiring and admission practices. They also told Sawyer that the Equal Rights Commission, which the governor defended, was poorly funded and had no real power. Where it found evidence of discrimination, it could only ask district attorneys to do something about it. The commission, they insisted, should have the power to issue cease-and-desist orders with the force of law and the right to suspend or revoke business licenses if necessary. Kellar dismissed the governor’s statement that the commission was a “vigorous” organization. “It’s been so vigorous that it hasn’t even met,” Kellar told Sawyer.³¹

In 1963 the NAACP and a coalition of religious and political groups sought to rectify these problems through civil rights legislation patterned after bills then before the U.S. Congress. Governor Sawyer endorsed the legislation because he realized that the federal government would soon outlaw racial discrimination, including discriminatory practices in Nevada’s gaming industry, if the state failed to act first. He urged lawmakers to pass a civil rights act tailored to Nevada’s needs and circumstances in order to avoid federal intervention. But legislators, some of whom went out of their way to criticize the civil rights movement, voted down Sawyer’s proposals. “I feel that the colored people in this state have never been so well off,” said Senator James Slattery of Storey County, who headed the committee that killed the proposed legislation. Some “colored people” in Las Vegas, Slattery added, lived in better homes than he did and drove better cars. Senator William Dial of Ormsby County suggested that the problems of blacks in Nevada were no greater than those of Irish Americans in the state. He even proposed abolishing the state’s Equal Rights Commission.³²

Such words galvanized civil rights leaders. Adopting militant tactics, in the summer of 1963 the Las Vegas NAACP announced plans for a mass demonstration to be held just before a prizefight to be nationally televised from the Strip. Organizers promised authorities a “quiet,” “orderly” march along Las Vegas Boulevard, but warned that they were determined to have their demands addressed. Charles West, the first black physician in Las Vegas and an influential local leader, evoked images of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation when demanding an end to discrimination. “For 100 years we have been promised freedom,” he said, “now we want pay-day!”³³ Black leaders canceled the demonstration only after executives of Strip resorts agreed to discuss with them the hows and whys of ending discrimination in the resorts.

A 1963 report by the Nevada Tuberculosis and Health Association demonstrated the plight of the city’s black community. The Westside, the report noted, had the characteristics of an urban ghetto. More than a third of its residents were children under fourteen, and a quarter of them lived in broken homes. Nearly two-thirds of girls and women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four had one or more children, and adults had educational levels far below those in the rest of the city. Four in five had never graduated from high school, and one in five had attended school no more than four years. For these and other reasons, median family income in the Westside was only 63 percent of that of the city as a whole. Area real estate values underscored the economic gap. Fewer than 20 percent of Westside homes were worth more than $15,000, compared to about 75 percent of homes elsewhere in the city.³⁴

The national Civil Rights Act of 1964 spurred the push to end racial discrimination in Las Vegas. Title VII of that act prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or national origins and unions from maintaining hiring halls and seniority systems that disadvantaged female and minority workers. It mandated substantial penalties for violations of these provisions and encouraged states to enact their own civil rights laws furthering equality in the workplace and in public accommodations. The law prompted the Nevada legislature to pass its own civil rights bill, which banned discrimination on the basis of race and gender in public accommodations and in businesses employing more than fifteen people. Governor Sawyer signed the bill in front of fifty of the state’s leading civil rights advocates, calling it “one of the greatest landmarks in all legislation in the history of Nevada.”³⁵

However, discrimination was so deeply entrenched in Las Vegas and its resort industry and unions that the new legislation had little initial effect. In 1965–66, African Americans filed record numbers of complaints with the Nevada Equal Rights Commission, charging officials at all levels, including those in the public schools as well as in private businesses, with violating the laws. Many of the complaints focused on unions and the job referral system that was central to their relations with management in the resort industry. Referrals privileged applicants according to their skills and experience, which protected seniority but denied opportunity to women and minority men. The system had to be overhauled to eliminate inequities in its operational results.

Initially, labor leaders disregarded these demands. Most of those leaders considered charges of discrimination against unions as unwarranted, even malicious; in their view, African Americans held menial jobs because they lacked the training and skills essential for better positions. Robert Park of the electricians’ union, for example, told reporters that “very few” African Americans had applied to his union’s apprenticeship program, and those who did so were too deficient in math, “the electrical trade’s most important tool,” to succeed in the program. “Let someone send us Negroes who are qualified,” Park stated, “and there will be no problem of admitting them.”³⁶ Dave McGinty of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union similarly dismissed charges of discrimination against his union as “hogwash.” Like other officials in the building trades, he viewed the requirements for entry into apprenticeship programs as race neutral. His union’s program, he insisted, was not only “fair” but its fairness was “well proven.” “We are turning out the best apprentices in Nevada, and we feel it is due in large measure to our method of selection.”³⁷

Until the federal government enforced the civil rights act, the Culinary was the only racially diverse union in Las Vegas. Yet almost all of the union’s black members had “back-of-the-house” jobs and subordinate positions in terms of labor organization and leadership. Most worked under the direction of white supervisors and were generally indifferent to their union. African Americans were expected to stay in their “place” in the work environment and act deferentially to white co-workers. The recollections of Alma Whitney, who worked as a maid at the Desert Inn in the 1950s, spoke pointedly to these patterns. “When I went there,” she said of the Desert Inn, “they had one black supervisor and the rest was white.” There were no black waiters or waitresses in the resort, and no black bartenders, dealers, or front desk workers. The resort’s black workers had their own “space” in the employee cafeteria. “The blacks would be sitting like in the back and the whites was in the front,” Whitney recalled. Whitney was not particularly proud of her union and seldom attended union meetings. “I just kept my dues up,” she said.³⁸

In the early 1960s, however, black resort workers, including Alma Whitney, began to feel differently about the Culinary. By then, most resorts had hired African Americans to fill jobs previously held by whites, and the union had placed several of its black members in leadership positions. Black shop stewards helped monitor and enforce provisions of the collective bargaining agreements and disseminate union policies and directives. Whitney said the stewards, who were typically elected by co-workers, convinced her to attend union meetings and express her opinions about workplace problems. One of the stewards, Sarah Hughes, went from resort to resort to discuss the problems and challenges black workers faced in the new workplace environment. Whitney credited Hughes for breaking down customs and traditions that separated blacks and whites in dining and other areas at work. “I tell you, she was a black woman [who] was on the ball.”³⁹ Indeed, Hughes was one of the many unsung heroes of the Las Vegas civil rights movement. In addition to her role as union steward, she was an early member of the Nevada Equal Rights Commission and used that role to identify discriminatory employment practices in resorts and to pressure public officials to end them.⁴⁰

For Essie Shelton Jacobs, who moved to Las Vegas from Fordyce, Arkansas, in 1963, the elevation of African Americans in the Culinary gave black workers a new sense of pride and respect. Jacobs worked in the Aladdin’s housekeeping department for twenty-three years, during which time she became a supervisor as well as a union steward. The Culinary, she recalled, had several black stewards and business agents in the 1960s, and she credited them with breaking down on-the-job forms of segregation and unease over desegregation. “All those peoples was good agents,” she explained. “They was there for you. They was there.”⁴¹ When Jacobs herself became a steward, she too worked to advance the interests of black workers, “to keep our peoples from being dogged around,” as she put it. She attended union meetings regularly and learned all she could about union affairs. She developed a new respect for union leaders at those meetings. “They kept educating me,” she explained. “They said this is your union, give us your opinion, let us know what you want us to do. Let us know what you want us to put in the contract. When we go to the table, we’ll negotiate, so that’s the way they done it.” Jacobs was especially fond of Al Bramlet, whom she called “one of the [most] gracious man I know.”⁴²

Overhauling hiring practices and training programs was difficult, however, even for well-intentioned people. If union policies had to meet legal requirements, union leaders also wanted policies acceptable to union members, whose attitudes about race and gender, though malleable, varied widely. Women and minorities sought increased employment opportunities and supported affirmative action programs. Implementation of those programs was often at the expense of union practices that favored skill and experience over race and gender equity, and thus favored skilled, experienced white males over minorities. Many who acquiesced in the need to eliminate discrimination had what they considered legitimate concerns about methods used to achieve that goal. Should applicants with little training and work experience have priority in the job market in order to compensate for past and present inequities? Should they be promoted over more skilled and experienced workers for the same purpose?

Union leaders confronted these discomforting questions as they faced the problem of negotiating new hiring policies with employers, whose attitudes on civil rights issues also varied. Some employers were willing to integrate their workforces and willing to cooperate with unions in order to do so. Others believed unions already had too much control of the hiring process and might use civil rights issues to enhance that control. Still others supported segregation and shared common values with employees in the workplace who harbored racial and gender prejudices. These views on both sides of the bargaining table made the task of dismantling racial and gender barriers difficult, but as things turned out, the controlling force proved to be relentless federal pressure on both unions and management to produce something approaching equality of results in hiring minorities and women.

In 1967 civil rights leaders urged newly elected Republican Governor Paul Laxalt to call a conference in Las Vegas to find “lasting solutions” to discrimination. As lieutenant governor, Laxalt had shown only limited support for civil rights and questioned the need for additional legislation or enforcement mechanisms. “I have constantly felt that legislation should be a last resort only when moral persuasion has failed to do the job,” he told civil rights leaders in 1965.⁴³ As governor, however, Laxalt arranged the proposed conference and delivered the opening address. In November, before an audience that included the mayor and representatives from a broad base of Las Vegas business, union, and civic groups, Laxalt acknowledged the difficulties African Americans faced in employment and other areas and pledged himself and his administration to work with employers and others to rectify the situation. Recognizing the need for action, Laxalt had already increased funding for the Equal Employment Commission and directed the agency to work with business leaders to achieve equitable results.⁴⁴

The “Solutions Conference,” as it was called, gave civil rights leaders a public forum, which they used effectively. Charles Kellar, who now headed the Las Vegas NAACP, and Woodrow Wilson, the first black assemblyman in Nevada, gave rousing speeches, reminding Laxalt and other officials that previous efforts to integrate Las Vegas workplaces had failed in the face of long-standing discrimination and official indifference. Less than 2 percent of Nevada’s five thousand state employees were African Americans, they noted, and those few held mostly menial jobs. Discriminatory practices in housing, public education, and law enforcement were equally pressing issues that had to be confronted.⁴⁵

Conference working sessions gave special attention to the problem of employment discrimination. They identified practices that kept African Americans out of many areas of employment in the resort industry. Employers typically used word-of-mouth to fill supervisory and other high-paying positions, for example, and often evaluated candidates for such positions on the basis of criteria unrelated to the jobs themselves. Blacks necessarily lacked training and experience in jobs traditionally closed to them, making it impossible for them to break into “all-white occupations” without some form of special assistance. The conference recommended creating new employment agencies and job training programs specializing in helping minorities overcome problems relating to past discrimination. The conference insisted that the Nevada Gaming Commission require compliance with nondiscrimination policies as a condition for approving and renewing gaming licenses. It also urged resort leaders to make greater effort to inform African Americans of job openings and provide them opportunities for work experience through on-the-job training programs.⁴⁶

The Solutions Conference had a significant impact on the city generally and on the resort industry specifically. It raised white consciousness about black problems and about policies and practices that caused or perpetuated those problems. In the aftermath, resorts, especially those on the Strip, hired African Americans in positions never before open to them. The Stardust, for example, hired black dealers, security guards, and wait people; other resorts did likewise.⁴⁷

Progress, however, was still slow. In May 1968 the NAACP filed a complaint with the Equal Rights Commission accusing a dozen resorts and two unions of denying equal employment opportunity to African Americans. The accused parties, declared Charles Kellar, had done little or nothing to bring about racial equity in their hiring practices. As a result, the vast majority of black workers in the industry remained in menial jobs. “Almost all the Negroes employed are porters or maids. Any other kind of employment is just token,” Kellar declared. “The Culinary Workers Union does nothing to improve this picture, [and] the Teamsters Union absolutely precludes it.” Kellar asked the commission for redress: “Only governmental agencies [can] cure these situations.”⁴⁸

The commission investigated and upheld Kellar’s complaints and found that the resorts and the unions did indeed limit blacks to low-paying, low-status jobs. Their hiring practices were thus not only illegal but intolerable and dangerous. “If this unequal treatment is allowed to continue,” the commission concluded, “the respondent hotels, by their neglect and lack of affirmative action, will create an area of racial tension so severe as to endanger the entire economy of our state.”⁴⁹

In fact, race relations were strained already. Since the riot in Los Angeles’s Watts district in 1965, the racial situation was explosive everywhere. In early 1969 police broke up fights between white and black youths at three high schools in Las Vegas. At one, whites reportedly threw a black student through a trophy case, and a “wild melee” at another involved a thousand students, prompting officials to close the school temporarily.⁵⁰ The situation grew worse on October 6, when gang-related assaults in the Westside hospitalized nearly two dozen people. On the following day, black youths looted several stores, and police fired tear gas to stop them. By then, Governor Laxalt had imposed a 7:00 p.m. curfew in the community and placed the Nevada National Guard on alert; police sharpshooters stood atop several buildings, including a major shopping center.⁵¹

The resorts and the unions cooperated to diffuse these mounting tensions. They asked the Equal Rights Commission to dismiss Kellar’s complaint because the underrepresentation of blacks in certain job categories was not in itself evidence of discrimination. African Americans constituted 10 percent of the local population and held 19 percent of hotel jobs. The problem, the lack of qualified black applicants for skilled and high-paying positions, would take time to solve, and to privilege unqualified or underqualified blacks over better-qualified whites would create a new set of problems.⁵²

Robbins Cahill of the Nevada Resort Association (NRA) had already made similar arguments. After the Westside riots, however, he told the governor that the NRA understood the “urgency” of opening job opportunities for blacks, though the state should not assume resorts were discriminating “simply because an imbalance exists in certain categories of employment.” The hotels had “worked earnestly to assist all minority groups to find better employment opportunities,” he insisted, noting that two of the five members of the Equal Rights Commission agreed that there was “no evidence of unlawful discrimination” in the resort industry in Las Vegas.⁵³

While Cahill made these points publicly, he privately urged the resorts to increase minority employment in underrepresented areas. “To do less,” he told the hotels, “is to invite even more criticism of the industry no matter how unjustified and baseless we know it to be. To disarm our detractors we must be equipped with the ammunition of a plan.”⁵⁴ Resort managers and owners now understood this and had in fact already begun to remedy the situation. In January 1970 the NRA announced an eight-point plan to place blacks in better jobs, pledging among other things financial support for an NAACP-sponsored program to train workers for jobs in the industry and for a scholarship program for minority students in the College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.⁵⁵

Industry leaders considered these actions generous and progressive; civil rights advocates called them insufficient. “The sum of $75,000,” Kellar said of money pledged for the job-training program, “is altogether too small to do the job. The Las Vegas Branch believes that a budget of $200,000 for each of three years is more feasible.” Kellar also insisted that the hotels do what was necessary to dispel the perception that the money pledged was “a palliative to keep the Branch quiet.”⁵⁶

The situation reached a turning point in 1970, when the U.S. Justice Department made an investigation of industry hiring practices and promptly concluded that all members of the NRA were engaged in racially discriminatory and therefore illegal practices. So, too, were four unions to which workers within those resorts belonged—the Bartenders, the Culinary, the Stagehands, and the Teamsters. As evidence, department investigators pointed to the skewed distribution of employees in the industry. Assistant Attorney General Jerris Leonard, who headed the investigation, found that the concentration of minorities in menial jobs in the industry indicated “hiring, referral and assignment based on race” that worked to the disadvantage of minorities. Part of the problem was the provision in collective bargaining agreements that said union referrals gave priority to work experience. Those provisions are illegal, Leonard stated, because they had the effect of excluding minority applicants from well-paying and otherwise attractive jobs. In addition, some of the qualifications and requirements the unions used to judge members qualified for job referrals were legally suspect because the skills, knowledge, and/or experience specified had no relationship to the jobs themselves.⁵⁷

Leonard threatened to sue both the hotels and the unions but agreed to withhold the suit if the parties promptly established compliance programs that ended the discriminatory practices and meaningfully increased minority employment at nonmenial levels of work and pay. To meet Leonard’s requirements, compliance programs would have to target specific job categories in which minorities were underrepresented, establish a central personnel office committed to increasing minority employment in these categories, and track improvements in minority employment. To facilitate realizing these goals, he advised the industry to establish recruitment programs in the black community.⁵⁸

The industry and the unions alike took the threatened lawsuit seriously. Both wanted to limit federal “interference” in what each regarded as its own affairs. If outward displays of cooperation masked private intentions to contain as much as possible the changes demanded, both nonetheless took definite steps toward desegregating the workplace. In the first six months of 1971, they conferred jointly with the Justice Department and civil rights leaders to define, develop, and implement acceptable programs. By June they had hammered out a “Black Consent Decree,” which the Justice Department filed with the federal court, giving the court authority to enforce its provisions. At the same time, the department filed suit against the signatories of the decree charging them with violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and threatening to press the suit unless they complied with the decree.

In the Consent Decree, the resorts and the unions promised to hire, promote, transfer, and train employees without regard to race. In nearly two dozen job categories, they pledged to post public notices of all vacancies for all employees to see and to hire at least one African American in every four new hires until blacks represented at least 12.5 percent of the workforce in each category. The unions pledged to cooperate in minority training programs and to track progress in minority employment in areas within their respective jurisdictions and in the movement of minorities into supervisory positions. Together, labor and management could ask the court to dissolve the decree after three years, which presumably the court would do if the patterns of discrimination had been eliminated.⁵⁹

The NRA led the joint effort to comply with the decree, preparing compliance manuals, offering legal advice, and working with the unions to set up training programs and equalize job referrals. It also disseminated information about job opportunities in minority communities, making widespread use of newspapers and radio stations and working with the NAACP and the Nevada State Employment Security Department for this and related purposes.⁶⁰

The effort soon drew praise from the Nixon administration’s Justice Department. After reviewing the first compliance report, filed in late 1971, Assistant Attorney General Stuart Herman concluded that the industry had made “substantial progress” in implementing the decree, pointing to recent hiring of African Americans as dealers, cocktail waitresses, switchboard operators, and cashiers. Less progress had been made in hiring black bartenders, front desk workers, and restaurant servers. The unions, Herman thought, were referring adequate numbers of qualified black applicants in these and other categories, but some resorts—the Aladdin, the Riviera, the Stardust, and the Tropicana—had made too little progress in equalizing their workforces.⁶¹

Achieving these results meant rewriting collective bargaining agreements. In April 1972, for example, the Teamsters agreed to the hiring of qualified African Americans from outside its referral system. The “memorandum of understanding” that acknowledged this agreement permitted resorts to hire one African American “outsider” for each African American hired through union referral. The concession, which the union would never have agreed to under other circumstances, encouraged hiring blacks in such areas as parking attendants, gardeners, and warehousemen, as well as switchboard operators and room and reservation clerks.⁶²

By summer 1972 the Consent Decree had reshaped personnel and hiring policies through unprecedented labor-management cooperation, which both agreed to with misgivings. Working with civil rights advocates was easier said than done, and the progress made was often disappointing to everyone. Nonetheless, by late 1972 the number of black bellmen at the hotels, for example, had risen from 10 to 15 percent of the total, and the number of black switchboard operators from none to nearly 10 percent. By then, African Americans had many jobs in casinos, too, their proportion of keno writers, for example, having increased from 2 percent to 16, and of dealers from 2 to 7 percent.⁶³

Gains elsewhere were less impressive. African Americans held 5 percent of secretary-receptionists and parking lot attendants jobs, though their numbers in these categories had doubled; and they constituted just 6 percent of food and beverage servers. The latter figures could be attributed in part to problems in the job-training program. Sixty African Americans entered the training program for wait staff by late 1972, but only fifteen completed it. The reasons for this were multiple. Some trainees worked at other jobs and complained of being too tired to attend classes, while others lost interest after learning more about wait work.⁶⁴

The Justice Department pressured laggard hotels and unions to match the progress others had made. After reviewing the situation in late 1972, for example, the department chided the Hilton Flamingo for “lack of progress,” accusing it of “complete disregard for the goals and timetables to which the hotel obligated itself in the Consent Decree.” Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger, who made this accusation, was especially critical of the Flamingo’s failure to hire more African American card and dice dealers. “This sort of progress,” Pottinger said of the fact that the number of blacks dealing at the Flamingo had increased by only one, “is not tolerable.” He noted too that in the preceding quarter, twelve of fourteen African Americans had failed auditions as dealers, compared to two of fifteen whites. “Such results,” Pottinger thought, “raise serious questions as to the audition procedure and the Flamingo’s intent to comply with the Decree.”⁶⁵

Despite such foot dragging, by early 1973 the industry had met thresholds for compliance in fourteen of twenty-three job categories, in some of which blacks were well over 12.5 percent of the workforce. Half of all warehousemen in the industry were now blacks, as were a third of all gardeners, doormen, and bar assistants, a quarter of all typists, and a fifth of front office cashiers and keno writers. In addition, black bartenders, cocktail waitresses, and bellmen had reached levels only slightly below the goal of 12.5 percent. Both management and labor expected such figures to justify dissolution of the decree within a year.⁶⁶

In June 1974 the Teamsters petitioned the court to relieve it of obligations under the decree. Attorneys for the union argued that the union had fulfilled its responsibilities, citing levels of African American employment in job categories over which it had jurisdiction. But the EEOC, the plaintiff in the case, countered that the petition was premature because not all resorts had yet met the 12.5 percent hiring goal in some of the targeted areas under Teamster control. It also urged the court to keep the decree in place to facilitate elimination of beneath-the-surface practices that still favored whites over minority employees and men over women. Compliance with the decree, it insisted, was not equally vigorous or successful in all resorts or all areas of employment.⁶⁷

EEOC attorneys offered testimony from African American employees to substantiate these charges. Harold Harkness, a timekeeper at the MGM Grand, claimed that MGM posted notices of openings in supervisory positions only after the openings were filled. “Only one notice was ever posted, and that was after the job had been filled,” Harkness testified. “I was aware of this because of my employment in timekeeping.” This practice had kept Harkness from applying for a job in public relations. “The Assistant Publicity Manager resigned on a Thursday in the latter part of April 1974,” Harkness recalled. “I saw the resignation before it was even posted and called Mr. Burke [head of personnel], and he told me he was glad to accept my inquiry but the position had been filled Tuesday.” Harkness had previously worked at the Las Vegas Hilton, which he said had also violated the decree. He told the EEOC that the hotel had filled at least three supervisory positions in the comptroller’s office without advertising them.⁶⁸

Clemmie Woodward also experienced racial discrimination in the industry. In 1973 the Mint Hotel promoted Woodward, one of its few black casino workers, from a change girl to cashier, only to fire her a few weeks later after she was involved in a fight with a white co-worker. According to Woodward, the experienced co-worker knew that the novice Woodward needed to ask job-related questions but refused to speak to her and provoked the incident that got her fired. The Culinary had investigated Woodward’s dismissal but concluded that it had been justified, at which point Woodward charged the union as well as the Mint with discrimination. The Culinary had not taken her grievance seriously, she said, noting that the union had recently helped reinstate a white cashier dismissed by the Mint for stealing. “She made a complaint to the Union,” Woodward said of the cashier, “and they took her case all the way up and got her job back for her.”⁶⁹

Aggrieved workers like Woodward not only thwarted efforts to dissolve the Consent Decree but brought to light problems of white women and Hispanics as well as those of African Americans. Employment practices in the industry had traditionally hurt all of these groups significantly. In 1970, when women accounted for a third of the Clark County workforce and about the same portion of employees in hotels and gaming, the resorts employed no female dealers or bartenders, and none as parking lot attendants, gardeners, or similar blue-collar workers. Women represented about three-quarters of the office and clerical workers, and the vast majority of maids, cashiers, and switchboard operators. Wages were low in these unskilled or semiskilled jobs.⁷⁰ Hispanics, who accounted for about 5 percent of the Clark County workforce, also found themselves disproportionately in unrewarding jobs. During the early 1970s, Hispanics had filed their own complaints with the EEOC accusing employers of discrimination.⁷¹

The struggle for employment rights in Las Vegas thus broadened significantly. After the courts refused to dissolve the Consent Decree, the EEOC asked major resorts and unions for permission to examine their personnel records for purposes of determining employment patterns among women and Hispanics. When both tried to limit access to their records, EEOC commissioner Raymond Telles charged them with discrimination, insisting that processes already well advanced in dealing with discrimination against African Americans be expanded to help females and Hispanics. To avoid litigation and bad publicity, the parties agreed to meet regularly with civic leaders and community groups in order to improve job opportunities for women and Hispanics and to submit regular reports to the commission detailing the status of their employment for the next five years. They agreed to set up new job training programs and to recompense women who could show that they had been denied equal job opportunities in the industry.⁷²

Women and minority men continued to find new opportunities in resorts through the 1970s. By 1978, about a quarter of the Strip’s 2,600 roulette, blackjack, and baccarat dealers were women, and Hispanics accounted for 7 percent of the Strip’s dealers, 9 percent of its blue-collar workers, and 10 percent of housekeeping supervisors.⁷³ Meanwhile, job opportunities for African Americans improved. The EEOC concluded in 1978 that Strip properties had met their affirmative action goals in all but a handful of job categories targeted by the Consent Decree. The Flamingo, to cite one example, had met employment goals in nineteen of twenty-two targeted categories.⁷⁴ However, the commission concluded that the parties had not yet met their “ultimate goals” and should not yet be relieved of their obligations under the decree. Therefore, the decree remained in effect.⁷⁵

By the late 1970s the civil rights movement in Las Vegas had largely succeeded in eliminating employment discrimination in the resort industry. Though discrimination in the industry persisted, the movement had reshaped the racial and sexual composition of resort workforces. That improvement owed much to the vigilance of the Justice Department and EEOC in enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it also reflected the commitment and hard work of civil rights leaders and aggrieved workers, especially African Americans.⁷⁶ With the powerful language of “rights,” African Americans had repudiated gradualist approaches to integration and won a real measure of equality in the workplace in Las Vegas resorts. “We want all of our rights, here and now,” Reverend Donald Clark said at the time. “Even if the opportunity for the Negro in Las Vegas was ninety-nine percent better, we would still not be satisfied.” Like civil rights advocates across the country, Clark measured “equality” and “progress” mainly by the number of black workers in jobs traditionally held strictly by whites.⁷⁷

The role of the Nevada Resort Association and organized labor loomed large in this story. Like most employer associations, the NRA searched for ways to lower labor costs and increase worker efficiency without regard to such “nonmaterial” things as race, gender, or ethnicity. Personal prejudices no less than government dictates could be accommodated to market forces. Once it grasped the imperatives of the situation, the NRA approached workplace discrimination as it approached other labor problems, pragmatically, methodically, and with an eye on the bottom line of profitability. To be sure, trade unions in Las Vegas posed problems in the fight for employment rights, but those organizations were never as bent on restricting opportunities for African Americans as their counterparts in manufacturing centers that faced the problem of deindustrialization, or institutions in the Deep South that refused to take even a tokenistic approach to integration. By the time the Civil Rights Act passed into law, the Las Vegas Culinary was already a multiracial institution, with black stewards and business agents that helped women and minority men gain greater control of their labor power. With grass-roots activism and public policy leading the way, resort owners and organized labor played a constructive role in ushering in a new workplace regime in Las Vegas.