KVIG Informative

The Nevada Equal Rights Commission that investigates discrimination complaints across the state today — in housing, employment and public accommodations — didn’t exist when Las Vegas casino owners agreed in 1960 to stop turning away Black customers. That 1960 agreement was a private deal with no legal enforcement mechanism; the actual law banning discrimination in Nevada’s hotels, restaurants and casinos didn’t reach the state’s books for another five years, and the commission enforcing it is still adding protected categories, most recently in 2025.

On March 25, 1960, gaming industry representatives agreed to end employment discrimination and open Las Vegas hotel-casinos to Black customers, following negotiations led by NAACP leader James McMillan alongside Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson and Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer, according to the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, a project of Nevada Humanities. The agreement was a voluntary compact among private businesses, not a change to state law — it carried no statutory penalties and created no enforcement agency.

Sawyer said afterward that he moved immediately to get legislation started to create a human relations commission with authority to investigate civil rights abuses and the power to take corrective action, according to his own account preserved by the Online Nevada Encyclopedia.

The Nevada Legislature created what state law now calls the Nevada Equal Rights Commission in 1961, codified as Chapter 233 of the Nevada Revised Statutes, according to the Legislature’s own published statutes. The commission’s administrator was given authority to investigate discriminatory practices and tensions in housing, employment and public accommodations, mediate disputes, and, after a hearing, order violators to stop discriminatory conduct and restore benefits to people harmed by it.

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It took four more years after the commission was created before the Legislature passed a law giving it something specific to enforce in hotels, restaurants and casinos. Chapter 651 of the Nevada Revised Statutes, the state’s public accommodations law, was enacted in 1965, guaranteeing all persons the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation, based on race, color, religion or national origin, according to the Legislature’s statutes. That was five years after the Moulin Rouge Agreement and four years after the commission meant to enforce it already existed on paper.

The statute has been rewritten repeatedly since. The Legislature added disability as a protected category in 1969, added sexual orientation in 1991, added sex in 2011, added gender identity or expression in 2021, and, most recently in 2025, extended protections tied to breastfeeding, according to the Legislature’s own amendment history for the chapter.

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Nevada still tells the story of 1960 as the year Las Vegas desegregated. The year that actually put the state’s name behind that promise, with an agency and a law that could be enforced against a business that broke it, was 1965 — and the commission created in between spent four years with a mandate to investigate discrimination in a state that hadn’t yet written down what counted as illegal.