KVIG Informative

Before the Hoover Dam’s first construction contract was even let, five Las Vegas residents organized to make sure Black workers weren’t locked out of the jobs it would create. The organization they chartered nearly a century ago is still active in Las Vegas today.

Arthur McCants, Mary Nettles, Clarence Ray, Zimmie Turner and William “Bill” Jones chartered the Las Vegas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1928, according to the branch’s own published history. The branch became NAACP Branch #1111, a designation it still carries today, the history states.

McCants, a World War I veteran, served as the branch’s first president, according to the same history. Nettles owned multiple parcels in the Block 17 area of downtown Las Vegas, where many Black residents lived at the time, took in washing, ran boarding houses and served as a spokesperson for the Black community at town meetings, the branch’s history states.

The branch’s founding was a direct response to the hiring practices expected around the planned Hoover Dam project, according to the branch’s history. Black workers would go on to be systematically denied jobs on the federally funded project and barred from living in its company town, Boulder City, the history states.

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Community activists, including branch members, organized the Colored Citizens’ Labor and Protective Association to identify and prepare Black candidates for dam jobs, and contacted the NAACP’s regional representative, William Pickens, who traveled to Las Vegas and spoke at the Majestic Theatre, according to historian Claytee White’s account of the organizing, published in the Nevada Law Journal and drawing on Clarence Ray’s recorded oral history held by UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. Pickens argued publicly that the dam was being built with taxpayer money, the oral history recounts, and hiring opened to Black workers shortly after his visit.

Nevada’s governor and U.S. Sen. Tasker Oddie intervened with the U.S. Interior Department over the hiring question, eventually helping about 44 Black men secure jobs on the dam, according to White’s account, which draws on historian Eugene Moehring’s research. Even so, roughly 4,000 men had already been hired before dam construction began in early 1930, and none of them were Black, White’s account states, citing the same research.

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In the fall of 1939, the NAACP chapter petitioned the Las Vegas City Commission for equal access to the city’s amusement facilities. The commission did not act on the request, according to White’s account.

Branch #1111 is still active in Las Vegas today, according to its own published history, continuing the organizing tradition its five founders began nearly a century ago. The city’s civil rights infrastructure didn’t arrive with the 1960 agreement that desegregated the Strip, or the decade of pressure that led to it. It arrived a generation earlier, when five residents saw discrimination coming before it hit and organized against it in advance.