KVIG Informative

Nevada’s governor still issues an annual proclamation for a meeting that took place at a Las Vegas hotel on March 26, 1960. The agreement reached that day opened Strip and downtown casinos to Black customers for the first time — not through a court ruling, but through a negotiation brokered under the threat of a protest march.

The Moulin Rouge opened May 24, 1955, at 900 West Bonanza Road, just outside the boundary of Las Vegas’s historically Black Westside neighborhood, according to UNLV Libraries Special Collections. Will Max Schwartz, Louis Rubin and Alexander Bisno owned the property, and boxer Joe Louis served as its official host, according to the same source.

The hotel featured the city’s first line of Black dancers, under the direction of Clarence Robinson, and drew white entertainers and tourists from Strip resorts where Black performers could not stay as guests, according to UNLV Libraries Special Collections. The Moulin Rouge closed that October, five months after it opened, after going into receivership, the same source states.

By 1960, NAACP Las Vegas Branch #1111 had organized plans for a march down the Strip to protest segregation at the resorts, according to the branch’s own published history. Dr. James B. McMillan, the branch’s president, led that effort, the same source states.

Donate

Donate

The march never happened. On March 26, 1960, Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer, Las Vegas city officials and Strip resort owners met with NAACP representatives at the closed Moulin Rouge and agreed that Black customers could patronize the city’s casinos, hotels and showrooms, according to NAACP Las Vegas Branch #1111’s own account. Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun brokered the meeting, the same source states.

The agreement opened the Strip’s doors to Black customers, but it left the industry’s hiring practices largely untouched. Black workers remained largely excluded from customer-facing casino jobs after 1960, according to NAACP Las Vegas Branch #1111’s own account.

Donate

Donate

The hotel itself did not survive to see its history become official. The Moulin Rouge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, changed to Black ownership in 1989, and burned in fires in 2003 and 2009 before its casino facade was demolished in 2010, according to the property’s state historical marker. Only its neon sign, designed by Betty Willis, survived; it now stands in the Neon Museum, the same marker states.

None of that history stayed private. Nevada’s governor proclaimed Moulin Rouge Agreement Day again this year, on March 12, 2026, officially describing the 1960 meeting as proof that government, business, law enforcement, media and community leaders can confront injustice when they work together in good faith, according to the governor’s own proclamation. The hotel is gone. The state still marks the day its absence from the Strip’s rulebook became official.