KVIG Informative

One meeting inside a coffee shop on the Westside ended legal segregation in Las Vegas overnight in 1960. It didn’t end the underlying conditions that created it — and nine years later, that gap boiled over into violence just blocks away.

The Moulin Rouge Agreement was reached March 26, 1960, at the coffee shop of the former Moulin Rouge Hotel on Bonanza Road, according to UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. Las Vegas NAACP branch president Dr. James B. McMillan, the first Black dentist licensed in Nevada, had sent a letter to Mayor Oran Gragson a month earlier giving the city 30 days to desegregate or face a planned march down the Las Vegas Strip.

The meeting brought together Mayor Gragson, Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer, the local police chief, the county sheriff, resort owners and Black community leaders. Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun mediated the discussion. By the end of that single meeting, casino operators agreed to end policies barring Black customers from gaming, dining and staying at Strip and downtown properties.

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The agreement came five years after the Moulin Rouge itself opened as Las Vegas’s first racially integrated hotel-casino in 1955, according to UNLV Special Collections archives. The property operated for only about five and a half months before closing, undone by its distance from other resorts and a wave of overbuilding across the Strip that year. It later reopened and closed multiple times under a series of owners, including Sarann Knight Preddy, the first African American woman to hold a Nevada gaming license.

Segregation in Las Vegas before 1960 extended well beyond casino floors. Black-owned businesses that had operated east of the railroad tracks were barred from renewing their business licenses unless they relocated to the Westside, according to UNLV’s own historical account of the era. Housing covenants further restricted where Black residents could buy homes, concentrating the Black community into a single section of the city — a pattern that gave Las Vegas its historical nickname as “the Mississippi of the West,” despite Nevada never codifying segregation into state law the way Southern states did.

The Moulin Rouge Agreement changed the law. It didn’t change the underlying economic and housing conditions the Westside had been left with after two decades of segregation, according to UNLV’s historical record. Nine years later, in 1969, those unresolved conditions erupted into what’s now referred to as the West Las Vegas uprising.

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Claytee White, founding director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center, has documented the Moulin Rouge’s role as both the site of the 1955 integration experiment and the site of the 1960 agreement, describing the building as a driver of development on the Westside despite its brief operating life. The Moulin Rouge burned down in 2003; only its original neon sign survives today, preserved at the Neon Museum.

Las Vegas points to March 26, 1960, as the day the city desegregated. What the date doesn’t capture is what one meeting couldn’t fix — the housing covenants, business relocations and economic isolation built up over the prior three decades didn’t disappear because casino doors opened. The Westside is still working through what got left unresolved that day, more than six decades later.