KVIG Informative

For nearly three decades, two blocks of a dirt road Las Vegans called “Jackson Street” were the only place in the city where Black residents could sit down for a meal, get a haircut, or catch a late show without walking past a sign that barred them elsewhere. The same civil rights victory that ended that necessity is the reason almost none of it survived — and the Historic Westside is still working, six decades later, to answer what replaces it.

The Westside’s first commercial strip failed fast. Commerce there collapsed in 1905, according to a historical marker erected by the city of Las Vegas, Clark County, the federal Preserve America program and the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, after the rival Las Vegas Townsite opened on the east side of the railroad tracks and pulled business away.

The district that replaced it opened decades later, for a specific reason. By 1942, Las Vegas was a segregated city, and the same marker states that the Westside laid out a new commercial district that year to serve its own residents: two blocks, running from D Street to F Street along Jackson and Van Buren. The street is formally Jackson Avenue, not Jackson Street, according to an account published by the UNLV News Center; “Jackson Street” was simply what residents called it. By July 1942, permit applications on file with the city covered a grocery store, a barbershop, a beauty shop, a recreation center, a restaurant, a drug store and a gas station, the marker states.

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The district grew well past those first seven permits. Writing for the UNLV News Center, Claytee White, the founding director of UNLV Libraries’ Oral History Research Center, drew on roughly 20 years of interviews gathered for the center’s Documenting the African American Experience in Las Vegas project to describe a boom that ran from the 1940s into 1969. Restaurants, beauty and barber shops, nightclubs with their own gaming tables, hotels and boarding houses, and grocery stores lined Jackson Avenue and the surrounding streets, the account states. The city’s historical marker names the Cotton Club, the Brown Derby, El Morocco, the Louisiana Club, the Harlem Club, the Ebony Club and the Carver House — later renamed the Cove — among the businesses that opened there, alongside the Hotel Jackson.

Some of the district’s best-documented nights involved performers who could headline a Strip showroom but weren’t allowed to spend the night in one. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker performed at the Last Frontier in 1952, and her first stop in Las Vegas was the Westside, where she sought out a beauty shop and the local NAACP branch president, according to the UNLV News Center account. Her contract secured reserved tables for Black patrons at the Frontier, and she recruited support for integrating the showroom through Jackson Avenue’s barber and beauty shops, the account states.

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Residents who gave oral histories to the Oral History Research Center described a neighborhood that ran on foot traffic despite streets still unpaved in the mid-1950s. Lucille Bryant, who had migrated to Las Vegas from Tallulah, Louisiana, recalled walking from club to club on Jackson Avenue on Saturday nights carrying her dress shoes in hand because the rocky, unpaved street would have ruined them; she and her husband both worked back-of-house jobs on the Strip by day, according to her account in the UNLV News Center piece. Jackie Brantley, who bought candy as a child at a Westside grocery store residents called Mrs. Johnson’s, went on in 1972 to become one of the first Black women to reach mid-level management on the Strip, the same account states.

The marker credits the same 1960 civil rights campaign that integrated Las Vegas casinos with ending Jackson Avenue’s run. Once Black patrons and performers could spend their money on the Strip and downtown, the marker states, the Westside’s own nightclubs, cafes and hotels lost the customer base that had sustained them, and most of the businesses closed. The lone survivor the marker names still standing at Jackson and F today is the New Town Tavern. The same fight for integration that Jackson Avenue helped host is the reason Jackson Avenue itself emptied out — and more than sixty years later, the Historic Westside is still trying to fill what it lost.