Las Vegas has a unique civil rights history.

It began as a refuge from Jim Crow laws, but later enacted segregation laws so severe that it became known as the "Mississippi of the West." The city came full circle when it rescinded those laws before most of the country. But ultimately, when the city struck down segregation it was money, not just altruism, which drove social change. Las Vegas did all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

In the 1955, African Americans could neither eat nor sleep in the hotels and casinos in which they worked on Las Vegas’ Strip.  Black waiters entered through the back door. Sammy Davis Jr. and every other black performer slept in a bus in the rear of clubs or traveled to the black side of town knocking door-to-door looking for a warm bed after a performance.

But that all changed when the state’s first African American dentist moved to town. Dr. James McMillan, a local NAACP president, is credited with integrating the Strip in 1960, four years before Brown v. Board of Education.  Despite this tremendous victory, the battles for equal housing, jobs and schools continued.

In 1960, Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, asked lawyer Charles Kellar to move to Vegas and continue the fight for equality in the courts.

Betting on Black: The History of Black Las Vegas is a compelling and powerful story slated for PBS, which examines this community through the lives of these NAACP presidents.

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