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I agree.Part of an interview with Rev. Prentiss Walker conducted by Bernard Timberg on January 27, 1974. Walker describes discrimination during Hoover Dam construction and life in Las Vegas prior to segregation.
Reverend Prentiss Walker oral history interview, 1974 January 27. OH-01902. [Audio recording] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las
English
Collector: When you first came out here, what do you remember? Who was here? What do you know about that? Walker: I came here in nineteen hundred and thirty-three. I came here due to the fact that all over these United States it was known that they were to build a big dam here. There would be a lot of work and they were going to need a lot of help. Like all the others, I come in due to that fact. I came here from Oklahoma. And when I got here—well, by me being a Negro—there was plenty of work here all right and a lot of people here and a lot of people working, but no Negroes. They were just not hiring them down there at the Hoover Dam and not in any capacity to my knowledge. I think my knowledge is pretty thorough. There was a person here by the name of Arthur McCants who organized the NAACP to force these people to give Negroes jobs on Hoover Dam. There was no such thing as West Las Vegas as it's constituted now. It wasn't none of that. All Negroes, to my knowledge, lived uptown around First Street, Second Street, Third Street between what is now Fremont and Stewart, back in that neighborhood. Now there might have been a few others that worked on the railroad and for the railroad that lived over in the railroad yards. But, as Negroes are scattered out all over here now, it just wasn't so. And incidentally, believe it or not, back in that early day, to my knowledge, we could eat anywhere we want to eat, drink anywhere we want to drink, and gamble off our money any place we want to gamble, that is, if we had any money to gamble or eat with. There was no such thing as "Jim Crow" as such, as we knew it in the forties, the fifties, and the sixties.