Chapter XI
3 entries · 0 corrected · 1 contested
The dam’s power built a war plant, the war plant brought thousands of people out of the Jim Crow South, and the city they arrived in barred them from the industry they had come to build.
1941–45
Basic Magnesium Inc. built the largest magnesium plant in the world southeast of Las Vegas, running on Hoover Dam power, and turned out more than 160 million pounds of metal for aircraft and incendiaries. Around fourteen to fifteen thousand people worked it at peak, and the town of Henderson was built from nothing to house them. Airfields went up outside both cities — Las Vegas Army Airfield, which became Nellis, and Reno Army Air Base, which became Stead.
why it is Nevada’s The dam is the reason. A magnesium plant needs enormous continuous electricity and there was nowhere else in the West it could be had. Nevada’s second city exists because a reservoir built in 1936 made a war industry possible in 1941 — and the federal government has been the largest presence in southern Nevada ever since.
BMI construction 1941; peak employment cited between 14,000 and 15,000; over 160 million pounds of magnesium produced. Henderson was built as the plant’s townsite.
1942 onward
BMI recruited labour out of the South, and much of it came from two mill towns in particular — Tallulah, Louisiana, and Fordyce, Arkansas. The pay was multiples of what Jim Crow economies paid Black workers for the same hours. The housing they arrived to was segregated by design: Victory Village of 509 units for white workers, Carver Park of 324 for Black workers, the latter designed in 1943 by the architect Paul Revere Williams. Many found no housing at all and lived in tents and cars on the Westside, west of the tracks from downtown Las Vegas.
why it is Nevada’s This is Nevada’s share of the Great Migration and it is a specific, traceable one — two named towns, one employer, one power source. The population that built southern Nevada’s war industry was then excluded from the resort industry that same economy created. Black performers headlined Strip showrooms they could not sleep in.
Recruitment from Tallulah, Louisiana and Fordyce, Arkansas is documented in the BMI records and in Roosevelt Fitzgerald’s demographic work at UNLV. Victory Village 509 units, Carver Park 324, Williams as architect, 1943.
Moulin Rouge opened 1955; the agreement 26 March 1960
The Moulin Rouge opened on the Westside in 1955 as the first racially integrated casino in Las Vegas, and closed within months. Five years later, with the NAACP threatening a march down the Strip, the parties met in the shuttered building: Dr James McMillan, the NAACP branch president and the city’s first Black dentist; Governor Grant Sawyer; Mayor Oran Gragson; the police chief and sheriff; the resort owners; with the Sun’s publisher Hank Greenspun mediating. On 26 March 1960 they agreed to end the colour bar in the casinos, hotels and showrooms.
why it is Nevada’s Desegregation on the Strip was settled in a closed room by negotiation under threat of a march, in a defunct casino, five years before the state passed a civil rights act. It was a bargain between an industry and a community rather than an act of law — which is exactly how Nevada has settled almost everything on this page.
The agreement, its date and its participants are well documented. ⚠ The epithet “Mississippi of the West” is widely repeated of Las Vegas in this period but I could not source it to a contemporary use in this pass — treat it as reported, not established.