KVIG Informative

On March 26, 1960, Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer and Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson met with NAACP Las Vegas Branch President James B. McMillan and Strip resort operators at the Moulin Rouge hotel-casino and agreed to end segregation in the city’s casinos, hotels and showrooms. Sixty-six years later, the neighborhood that produced that threatened march — the Historic Westside — broke ground this spring on the largest federally backed housing redevelopment in its history. The 1960 agreement opened the front door. The investment meant to follow it is only now arriving.

The Moulin Rouge opened May 24, 1955, at 900 West Bonanza Road, becoming the first interracial luxury hotel-casino in Las Vegas, according to the UNLV Special Collections and Archives project Documenting the African American Experience in Las Vegas, overseen by Oral History Research Center founding director Claytee D. White. Owners Will Max Schwartz, Louis Ruben and Alexander Bisno built a property where Black and white patrons gambled, dined and watched entertainment together, a break from the segregation enforced on the Strip and downtown.

The property did not last. It closed after five months, entering receivership in October 1955 over unpaid debts to vendors and service providers, according to the same UNLV Special Collections account. The building stayed standing at the edge of the Westside, and five years after it shut down as a business, it reopened for one night as the site of a negotiation that reshaped the rest of the city.

By 1960, McMillan had organized Las Vegas’s Black residents to march on the Strip in protest of casino segregation, according to the NAACP Las Vegas Branch’s own published history of the campaign. Facing that threat at a time when Las Vegas depended on national tourism and favorable press, Sawyer, Gragson and resort operators agreed to sit down. Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun helped bring the two sides together, according to a 1981 recorded interview with McMillan.

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The negotiation happened at the Moulin Rouge on March 26, 1960. The resulting agreement, never reduced to a formal signed contract according to the NAACP Las Vegas Branch’s account of the negotiation, ended the policies barring Black patrons from entering casinos, hotels and showrooms through the front door. Black entertainers who performed on the Strip could now stay overnight as guests and gamble at the same properties that employed them.

The agreement did not reach hiring. Black workers stayed largely excluded from customer-facing casino jobs after 1960, according to the NAACP Las Vegas Branch’s history of the campaign — the deal bought entry, not employment.

That employment gap has outlived the 1960 agreement by more than six decades. A Nevada Workforce Diversity, Equity and Inclusion study published July 10, 2024, by UNLV International Gaming Institute researchers Becky Harris and Andrea Dassopoulos found women of color underrepresented at every level of Nevada’s gaming workforce relative to their share of frontline jobs. Among seven publicly traded Nevada gaming companies examined, the median corporate board seated zero women of color, with a range of zero to two, according to the study.

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The neighborhood tied to the 1960 negotiation has waited decades for a comparable reckoning in its own housing stock. In July 2024, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority a $50 million Choice Neighborhoods Initiative grant, one of seven awarded nationwide that year, to redevelop the Marble Manor public housing site at Washington Avenue and H Street in the Historic Westside. Officials broke ground on the project April 9, 2026, with plans to expand the site from 235 units to 627 units across five phases, backed by more than $200 million in additional public, private and nonprofit funding, at a total project cost of $350 million to $400 million.

Sixty-six years ago, a threatened march bought Black Las Vegans a door into the casinos their labor helped build. It took a federal grant competition, a housing authority and a five-phase construction timeline running through 2032 to bring comparable investment back into the neighborhood that forced that door open. The door opened in 1960. The rebuilding didn’t start until this year.