While moments of civil unrest may feel chaotic as they’re happening — the protests and deaths of civil rights leaders in the 1960s; the 1992 Los Angeles Riots; the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 — history often shows that these events (and the reactions that follow) reflect boiling points. They’re pressurized moments in time in which layers of related events build like a gathering storm.
And then they burst. Into protests, riots, and other movements that sweep across the nation.
On Oct. 5, 1969, one such precipitating event began with a bit of engine trouble and ends in the arrest of two young Black men while a neighborhood looks on at a scene that's not new to them.
Tyler D. Parry, associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and author of several publications on African American culture and history, elaborates about the events of that day, “[Gerald Davis] initially was outside to fix his mother's car. The engine wasn't starting, so he was going to look under the hood and happened to notice a Black taxi driver who had been pulled over by two police officers. The driver seemed visibly shaken by the experience, very nervous. They knew each other. So [Gerald] goes to ask what’s wrong. For whatever reason, at least one of the officers doesn't like this interference. He sees it as kind of a questioning of his authority.”
Gerald begins to walk toward his home, Parry describes. The police officer follows and tries to enter the house. Gerald’s brother Mike Davis gets involved, and the two brothers are arrested. By then, the incident had already drawn a large group of spectators from the neighborhood. Groups of Black youth began organizing to protest the police; police responded with blockades and curfews.
“You have three days of rioting. There’s property destruction, a few deaths occur, and basically, it's just a giant confrontation between police and the Black community on a scale not previously seen in the city,” says Parry.
Parry has gathered primary sources (interviews, news reports, legislation, and private correspondence) that show how the 1969 uprising wasn’t a singular event, but rooted in a history of racial tension that had existed between the police and Westside residents for several decades.
How did Las Vegas get to that explosive moment in 1969?
Well, we have to go back to 1905, Parry says, when Las Vegas was founded after the opening of a railroad line linking Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. There were two townsites: one where the current downtown area is located and another that is now home to the Historic Westside.
In those early years, Parry says, "there were people of African descent here, but the town was small and the numbers of African Americans were generally small. But there were some early forms of housing segregation. There were no specific laws, but it does seem that, for Black people in particular, they tended to group in one particular section of town. This was called Block 17.”
By the 1930s — during the Great Depression when the Hoover Dam was being built — segregation and the racial inequities that came with it became increasingly obvious. People were migrating across the country in search of jobs.
“It became very clear early on through hiring practices that no matter how many African Americans applied for a job at the Hoover Dam, they just weren't being hired,” says Parry. “And so the NAACP catches wind of this, the local civil rights leaders start to mobilize. They threaten legal repercussions if the companies are violating civil rights.”
Eventually, the U.S. president gets involved to deter the hiring restrictions. Still, only 44 Black men are hired to be a part of the dam’s construction. And Boulder City, which was formed in order to provide a place of residence for dam workers, didn’t allow Black people to live there.
“So that's an early phase to where you start to see Jim Crow policies being imposed,” Parry says.
Then World War II began and plants were built to develop materials that could be used in the war, Black Southerners began to leave jobs in sharecropping for better paying factory work. The Basic Magnesium Inc. plant in Henderson that opened in 1941.
“Basic Magnesium actually is very open to hiring Black employees, so it's a little different than what had happened with the dam,” Parry says. “But what you still find is there was mistreatment and discrimination targeting Black employees happening within the plant.”
Also in the 1940s and 50s came the great gambling boom as resorts and casinos were built on the Strip.
“African Americans could only work in the back of the house positions. They could not be seen nor heard, and they could only live in one area of town. That was what we call the Westside, and the demarcation of the Westside was the railroad track.”
Unlike the white areas of town, the Westside frequently lacked plumbing, electricity, or paved streets. Under the direction of then-Mayor Ernie Cragin, Parry says, Black business owners who had businesses east of the railroad tracks weren't allowed to renew their business licenses unless they relocated to the Westside. Housing covenants also were passed so that Black residents couldn’t buy a home anywhere else in town.
“This is when Las Vegas earns the reputation as the ‘Mississippi of the West’ because a rigid form of segregation took place here, though it was not mandated in state law like it would be in a place like Louisiana and Mississippi. But, the way it functioned in daily life was very much mirroring what happened in the Jim Crow South,” explains Parry.
Even famous Black performers like Pearl Bailey or Nat King Cole weren’t allowed to stay in the same casinos or resorts where they performed on the Strip. They had to stay in boarding houses located on the Westside. It was only when the short-lived Moulin Rouge opened in 1955 that white and black entertainers were able to freely mingle.
“[Las Vegas’] Jim Crow-style policies were basically a reactive response to the growth of the Black population within the city,” says Parry. “And this wasn't necessarily unique to Las Vegas. This happened in many other cities throughout the country, which is why in most major urban areas you go to, there's typically a black section of town because similar policies had been implemented during the era of the Great Migration.”
In 1960 NAACP branch president James McMillan, Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer, and a few powerful businessmen came together at the Moulin Rouge. Their agreement lifted lifted the Jim Crow restrictions and desegregated the city — at least legally.
“Then you have just significant underemployment and unemployment, especially among young people, within the Black community, and many of them still couldn't even leave the Westside … Then the police would go into these areas and harass young Black men under suspicions of criminality. So there was this building and mounting tension that was occurring,” says Parry.
And across the country, tensions between Black communities and the police were erupting as communities contended with similar legal and non-legal forms of racial segregation.
The uprising in West Las Vegas was just one of those perfect storm moments, Parry says, not just in the history of Las Vegas but in the U.S. in general during the 1960s.
“Would the ’69 uprising in Vegas have happened if other uprisings had not happened? If there wasn't this national pattern of uprisings elsewhere, would it have happened in ‘69? Obviously, we don't know that,” says Parry.
“What was unique about ‘69 was just this: That was the conclusion to a decade that exposed the false promises of many political leaders. It showed how people living in the post civil rights era remained dissatisfied with the lack of progress and demanded the government’s attention by openly resisting police brutality and systemic racism.”
