KVIG Informative

Las Vegas casino owners signed a federal consent decree in 1971 promising to open 12 percent of resort industry jobs to Black workers, the outcome of a legal fight one civil rights attorney waged for more than a decade. Fifty-five years later, the gaming industry reports a workforce that is majority-minority — a statistic its own trade association now cites, drawn not from any court still enforcing that 1971 order but from a voluntary company survey.

Charles Kellar moved to Las Vegas in 1960 at the urging of Thurgood Marshall, according to a profile of Kellar published by the State Bar of Nevada. Kellar sat for the Nevada bar exam that year and passed with a nearly perfect score, but the State Bar withheld his law license for five years before he received it in 1965, according to the same profile. He was the first Black attorney to sit for Nevada’s bar exam.

Kellar volunteered with the Las Vegas and Reno chapters of the NAACP while he fought for his license, according to UNLV Libraries’ Documenting the African American Experience in Las Vegas archive. He drafted a 1961 bill banning discrimination in public accommodations, housing and employment that led Nevada to create its Equal Rights Commission, according to the State Bar of Nevada profile, and he became president of the Las Vegas NAACP branch in 1967.

Donate

Donate

Kellar’s efforts led to a federal consent decree, United States v. Nevada Resort Association, signed June 4, 1971, according to the State Bar of Nevada and UNLV Libraries’ archive of the decree. The decree named the Nevada Resort Association and more than a dozen Strip and downtown hotels as defendants, including Caesars Palace, the Sands, the Desert Inn, the Flamingo, the Sahara, the Tropicana, the Riviera and the Stardust, according to UNLV Libraries.

Four labor unions signed the decree alongside the hotels: Local 995, representing clerical and maintenance workers; Local 720, representing theatrical stage employees; Local 226, the Culinary Workers Union; and Local 165, the Bartenders Union, according to UNLV Libraries. Every signatory agreed to allocate 12 percent of resort industry jobs to Black workers and to make employment decisions without regard to race, with 30 days to begin, according to the same archive.

Donate

Donate

The NAACP, the federal Concentrated Employment Program and Nevada’s State Employment Security Department were named to oversee the decree’s implementation, according to UNLV Libraries. The Nevada State Historic Preservation Office’s official historic context on the state’s African American civil rights struggle credits the 1971 decree with ending formal employment discrimination at Las Vegas resorts — but the same document finds that enforcement of the decree was weak once the initial 30-day window passed.

The American Gaming Association’s most recent workforce diversity study, published in April 2023, found that 61 percent of gaming industry employees are minorities, compared with 52 percent in hospitality generally and 42 percent across the U.S. workforce. Nineteen percent of gaming employees are Black, according to the same study, and the share of operator employees who are minorities has climbed nearly 20 percentage points since 2011. The study drew its figures from EEO-1 employment forms submitted by 26 AGA member companies spanning casino operators and gaming equipment manufacturers.

The 1971 decree carried the weight of a federal court and a 30-day deadline behind it. The industry’s current diversity numbers carry no comparable enforcement mechanism behind them — they come from a trade association’s voluntary survey of its own member companies, compiled more than five decades after Kellar forced Nevada’s casino owners into federal court to make the same promise on the record.