KVIG Informative

Six Companies, the contractor group that built Hoover Dam, employed no more than about 30 Black workers on the entire project and barred all of them from living in Boulder City, the federal town built to house its workforce. Ninety years later, Boulder City is still less than 1% Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — a demographic line drawn by hiring and housing rules written in 1931 that nobody in Boulder City has ever formally reckoned with.

Six Companies organized in 1931 to build Hoover Dam under its federal contract with the Bureau of Reclamation. Oral histories gathered by UNLV Special Collections for its “The Dam Rises” collection describe a hiring system that favored veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I, limited jobs to American citizens and excluded workers of Chinese descent under the contract’s terms. Six Companies made only what UNLV’s collection calls a token effort to hire Black workers under federal pressure, employing no more than roughly 30 over the life of the project.

Six Companies gave the Black workers it did hire the harder end of the job. UNLV’s collection says the company assigned them tasks most white workers on-site considered demeaning, including hauling away debris, and barred every one of them from living in Boulder City itself. Oral history narrators recorded by UNLV — longtime area resident Erma Godbey and construction-era workers Richard “Curley” Francis and Robert Parker — described a Black workforce that commuted in from Las Vegas instead; Francis recalled a crew led by a foreman named Charlie Rose.

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That housing line became a federal problem five years later. In mid-April 1936, NAACP Director of Branches William Pickens traveled to Las Vegas to visit the organization’s local branch and toured the dam at the invitation of Boulder Dam construction engineer Ralph Lowry, according to records held by the National Archives at Denver. On April 22, 1936, an elevator operator at the Arizona elevator tower refused to let Pickens’s party ride with white visitors and told them to wait for a second trip; when Pickens objected, a park ranger carrying a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge, W.E. Lukens, arrested him.

The arrest reached the top of the Interior Department within weeks, the Denver archive’s records show. NAACP Assistant Secretary Roy Wilkins protested directly to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Robert Weaver, the department’s adviser on Negro affairs, pressed Acting Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner John Page for answers, and Afro-American publisher Carl Murphy complained to President Franklin Roosevelt. Interior sent special agent J.D. Hanley from Chicago to investigate, and Ickes apologized to Pickens that August. By 1937, the same archive shows, the department’s attention had shifted from the elevator to the broader practice of excluding Black workers from housing in Boulder City altogether.

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That exclusion outlasted the dam’s September 1935 dedication, which Interior officials carried out under the name Boulder Dam — the informal label the department used for about 14 years even though Congress had designated the structure Hoover Dam by law in 1931, a designation Congress’s own resolution had to reaffirm on April 30, 1947. The exclusion also outlasted Six Companies itself. Bob Stoldal, a Nevada historian who chairs the Las Vegas City Historic Preservation Commission, and Claytee White, director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center, have each pointed to the hiring and housing lines Six Companies drew in the 1930s as the reason a Black community did not grow up around the dam — growth that waited instead for wartime hiring at the Basic Magnesium plant in Henderson starting in 1942, which drew Black workers into southern Nevada and settled them in Las Vegas’s Historic Westside, miles from Boulder City.

Boulder City is 0.8% Black today against 14.4% for Clark County as a whole, according to the Census Bureau — not a rounding error but the long tail of a hiring rule a construction contractor wrote in 1931 and a housing line the federal government spent a year investigating and never actually erased. The file Pickens opened in April 1936 still sits in a records series at the National Archives in Denver. The demographic line Six Companies drew around Boulder City still shows up in the census every ten years.