The Westside Slugger: Joe Neal's Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

by John L. Smith Narrated by Edward Herrmann, Synthesized Voice

Overview

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The Westside Slugger is the powerful story of civil rights in Las Vegas and Nevada through the eyes and experience of Joe Neal, a history-making state lawmaker in Nevada. Neal rose from humble beginnings in Mound, Louisiana, during the Great Depression to become the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate.

Editorial Reviews

Foreword Reviews

Smith uses an effective mix of interviews, new reports, and contemporaneous quotes to track Neal’s political rise…. Smith’s book portrays him as a man well respected even by his opponents for his consistency and convictions. With a daughter following in his political footsteps, Joe Neal’s story isn’t yet over, and The Westside Slugger does a nice job detailing what’s happened so far."

From the Publisher

Smith uses an effective mix of interviews, new reports, and contemporaneous quotes to track Neal’s political rise…. Smith’s book portrays him as a man well respected even by his opponents for his consistency and convictions. With a daughter following in his political footsteps, Joe Neal’s story isn’t yet over, and The Westside Slugger does a nice job detailing what’s happened so far."
—Foreword Reviews

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175465441
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	12/31/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4: From Photo Opportunities to Real Opportunities 
At the time, the irony was unacknowledged but inescapable: there were the much-publicized Moulin Rouge Agreements in 1960 between black leaders and the influential and image-sensitive white business and gaming community. This ended with a gentlemen’s agreement to improve hiring practices inside the casino industry. By then a green-felt ghost on the edge of the Westside, its six-month “heyday” already blending into Las Vegas legend, the Moulin Rouge provided an ideal backdrop for the photo opportunity the gathering created. Photographs of the meeting, which resulted in the cancellation of a scheduled march by blacks on the Strip — an act that would surely be bad for business and once again remind the outside world that the Strip’s casino kings were far behind the curve when it came to civil rights — were widely circulated. The meeting itself cemented the reputations of local black leaders and some vocal whites such as Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun as champions of the cause of social equality.

Some important strides were being made, and the efforts of those on the ground ought not to be discounted, but the agreement was as symbolic as substantive. It would take more than the agility of the Las Vegas News Bureau to change the ugly course of racial history in Southern Nevada. The so-called Moulin Rouge Agreement would make big headlines, but generate only small gains for blacks on the Strip. Without dedicated representation in local or state government, they were relegated to taking to the streets and making threats of insurrection in order to get the attention of the press and business bosses.
“The people who came out here from Fordyce and Tallulah where I came from just came here for jobs in the magnesium plant, and some came out a little bit earlier to work on Boulder Dam and were unsuccessful finding a job,” Neal said. “People came out here and were confronted with prejudice. With the exception of voting, they had no real rights no matter what they agreed to at the Moulin Rouge. They were able to vote, but the public accommodations were not open to them.”

Born of the desperation that accompanies high unemployment, poor living conditions, and the lack of a voice in the seats of political power, the rhetoric of the NAACP and Westside clergy was destined to increase in volume. Leaders such as Dr. James McMillan, Dr. Charles West, attorney Charles Kellar, and radio and television personality Bob Bailey were quoted often. But Kellar and McMillan especially were sometimes characterized in the media more in terms of their militancy than their advocacy.

In the wake of the Moulin Rouge Agreement, the real fight for equal treatment in the workplace had just begun. Neal followed the developments closely. In his eyes, the pattern of placation over progress was once again repeating itself.

Officially, the Nevada Equal Rights Commission (NERC) was created in 1961 out of the Moulin Rouge Agreement to oversee the state’s equal rights and equal opportunity programs, handling employment discrimination complaints relating to race, national origin, color, religion, and sex. It was positioned to receive complaints and attempt to settle them. Failing that, it would then send the complaints on to the applicable state and federal agencies.

Although former Nevada governor Grant Sawyer would be lauded deservedly for his courageous stance in support of civil rights in the Silver State, and he made his personal philosophy on the subject clear as far back as his first State of the State speech, in a candid moment he admitted he was essentially dragged into the position he took.

“Even though I was highly motivated to extend civil rights to Nevada’s black citizens, without constant urging from people who were directly involved in the movement I might not have been as committed as I was to advancing the cause,” Sawyer said in his oral history, Hang Tough! An Activist in the Governor’s Mansion. “We got as far as we did in such a relatively short period of time due in large measure to help — not just help, but ‘forceful’ help (laughter) — from members of Nevada’s NAACP, whose leadership kept things moving. Their initiative, energy, and resolve enabled us to pass civil rights legislation before Congress or Jack Kennedy had taken any position on the issue, putting Nevada in the forefront of a social reform issue on which it had long trailed the nation.”
Sawyer credited Kellar, McMillan, Bailey, West, and Reno political activist Eddie Scott for staying the course. Joe Neal’s friend Kellar was the best-versed in the law and arguably the most courageous of the group of activists who were also trying to manage their own business careers in a society where it was essential to maintain contacts in the white community. Keller was “perhaps the most aggressive member of the group, very impatient and demanding. He certainly kept the Legislature’s attention focused on civil rights, but he could sometimes be abrasive.” He came about his irritation with the status quo honestly. Born in Barbados, with a law degree from St. John’s University in New York, he moved with his family to Las Vegas in 1959 and fought for acceptance in the legal community. Kellar not only played an integral role in the historic Moulin Rouge meeting, but he battled to desegregate public schools and jousted in court on behalf of blacks wrongly accused of everything from loitering to homicide. Kellar’s undaunted courage — one cowardly critic fired gunshots into his home — earned him the reputation as a rabble-rouser, but also the respect of his community.

Sawyer’s legacy, meanwhile, was intertwined with his important role on the civil rights issue. In his oral history he took care to praise the Westside leaders. “All were on the same team, working for the same objective,” he said. “Each in his own way was very forceful, but while they were not equals in status and influence, and their efforts sometimes followed divergent paths, these men respected one another. I don’t recall ever looking to one specific guy and thinking, ‘This person will be able to dictate their position.’”

For his part, Sawyer rose swiftly through the political ranks in the 1950s in a state still shaking off the dust of its frontier heritage. A son of patronage, he was considered one of Nevada powerhouse U.S. Senator Pat McCarran’s “boys,” and he became integrally involved in the state’s political machinery as Elko County district attorney. When the time came to challenge two-term incumbent Charles Russell in 1958, Sawyer fought the weight of the Democratic Party machine in the primary, overcame the candidate it had chosen instead of him, and brought it to bear in the general election. He won handily.

But if anyone believed Sawyer might attempt to mimic the anti- Communist zealotry of the late McCarran, they would be sorely disappointed. Sawyer was an unabashed progressive who pushed to regulate the gangster-infested casino racket and pushed for equal rights. He angered conservatives in the state when he signed a proclamation designating “Black History Week” in February 1959 at a time the state’s own racial history left much to be desired.

When the opportunity came to press the casino crowd to pay more than lip service to its business and working relationships with blacks, Sawyer was a politically pragmatic progressive. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Democratic assemblywoman Maude Frazier, Sawyer surprised even himself by the watered-down success of the Nevada Equal Rights Commission enabling legislation. He’d been aided in his campaign efforts by grassroots organizing in the black communities in Washoe and Clark Counties, and upon election he was true to his word, adding civil rights to his first State of the State speech. Although it was a truly far-reaching bill, it would die in the state Senate as far too progressive.

The weaker version that was eventually signed into law did much to drag Nevada forward into the latter half of the twentieth century. Frazier was fearless, introducing Assembly Bill 122 and spending endless hours shoring up support. Although Sawyer recognized “there was little sympathy for civil rights, and I had difficulty even finding someone to introduce the bill (on the Senate side),” he had Frazier in the Assembly. She forwarded an admittedly less comprehensive bill during the 1963 session, “which proposed to outlaw discrimination in public employment and forbid all contractors who did business with the state to discriminate on the grounds of race, national origin, religion, sex, whatever. There was some resistance, particularly in the Senate, but the bill eventually passed and I signed it into law in March.”

Actually enforcing the law, of course, was entirely another matter. Nevada’s skeletal state government had no ability to police recalcitrant businessmen and even outright racists from denying blacks public accommodations in hotels and restaurants. But it could oversee its own contracts. Again, the symbolism outweighed the substance.

On paper, Nevada appeared to have emerged as a progressive state on civil rights. Sawyer was successful in creating the Nevada Equal Rights Commission in 1961, but it provided more theater than protection for blacks.

“The commission came after a lot of pressure from the NAACP at the time,” Neal recalled. “Its first chairman was Bert Goldwater, a white progressive guy. His selection upset a lot of people, and that’s when Bob Bailey was chosen. Bob was, to put it politely, a safe choice for the state’s bosses.” In the end, Neal was of the opinion that the commission produced a lot of reports without curtailing many practices, but it was also true that Bailey’s style and emphasis on opportunities for minority businesses made him more acceptable to the prevailing political power structure.

Opponents knew the best way to defeat the commission’s mission was to make sure it lacked the ability to investigate, and for two years it did little more than collect complaints. By 1963, however, NAACP leader Kellar and progressive Democratic assemblywoman Flora Dungan took it upon themselves to press for changes that would strengthen the commission, including greater investigative powers and a working relationship with the Legislature. The reaction to their efforts provided Neal a lesson in Nevada legislative politics: in a part-time “citizen’s Legislature” that in the early 1960s met for just 120 days every two years, delaying a bill was as effective as defeating it. So it was with a pair of bills in the 1963 session that sought to strengthen the state’s anemic Equal Rights Commission that Sawyer proudly considered so progressive.

With Dungan doing the ramrodding, the Assembly bill appeared to have an honest chance of gaining passage. But then the delays began. Civil rights progress was being made in major cities across the nation in 1963, but progress has never been the strong suit of the Nevada Legislature. Press accounts show the process gaining ground, but then running into difficulty not only with conservative Republicans, but with equally conservative Democratic leaders, including several influential Mormon legislators. The outspoken Kellar pointed to what he considered the obvious influences at work and, when that wasn’t enough, set up a picket line in an attempt to call attention to the stalling tactics.

New civil rights legislation would follow the same tumultuous course in the state Senate, where Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt made several promises and talked of compromise, with the only impact being a delay in the process. Improvements to the Tinkertoy Equal Rights Commission failed in both houses.
Casino bosses had little interest in being hurried toward integrating their joints, or their workforces. There was substantial pushback from Mormon legislators, and during the height of the debate Democratic House Speaker Ty Tyson simply stopped coming into work. A vote in the Assembly drew scant Republican support and lost 23-13, but more importantly, conservative Democrats were deaf to the appeals of Sawyer and the NAACP.

The comments of Senate Majority Leader Charles Gallagher of White Pine County were typical of Republican rhetoric on the bill in hand and the issue generally. “It is too late now to introduce a bill of this importance,” he said. “At this late date, we would prefer to amend the present law rather than introduce new legislation.” Besides, he added, his colleagues weren’t about to take “dictation” from Sawyer. When pressed, Gallagher reflected the viewpoint of his colleagues: the fact they promised to stop any attempts to strengthen the state’s civil rights laws didn’t mean they were necessarily opposed to civil rights as a general proposition, but only that the Legislature lacked the time to do the job right.

Meanwhile, scribbling skeptics in the press noted, other bills were moving through the process without incident.

Kellar lamented, “This is a strange type of logic. No doubt they think we are too ignorant to understand such a thing. We are now going to start demonstrations to let the world know what is going on in Nevada.”

Placards reading “Democrats wreck civil rights,” “Gamblers deny civil rights,” “Mormons are against civil rights,” and “Republicans wreck civil rights” hung from the necks of adults and children in a nearly silent protest.

The reaction was almost immediate. Blacks were promised action by Laxalt, the president of the Senate, from the Legislature’s Republican-dominated upper house. He said senators would amend legislation to carry forward where the Assembly bill had foundered. Laxalt and his fellow Republicans were apparently motivated in part by the Kellar’s picket line. Laxalt publicly said he believed the bill would work “if we get the right people appointed” to the commission, which lacked the power to accomplish anything of substance.

“We reiterate that regardless of personal sympathy, it is too late to take a second try,” Gallagher told a reporter. But Dungan scoffed at the notion. “There’s talk of a gambling tax being introduced at this late date,” she countered.

Senate Democrats, rarely lionhearted in the best of years, were in the narrowest minority in the seventeen-member upper house. Some were vocal about being willing to introduce civil rights legislation, but they noted the obvious: without some Republican support, their efforts were doomed.

Given an opportunity to lead, Nevada again chose to placate when necessary, obfuscate and obstruct when possible. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, which upheld the right of Congress, in its duty to control interstate commerce, to pursue methods to abolish racial discrimination in areas of public accommodation, would give the state the opportunity to change.
Neal returned to Las Vegas full-time in the summer of 1963 armed with a political science degree, training in law enforcement and criminal science, a top-secret clearance from the Department of Energy, and four years of experience in the Air Force. He scoured the community for work that might challenge him, but like most blacks in Southern Nevada was told he wasn’t quite right for the available white-collar jobs. He landed at Titanium Metals Corporation, a World War II-era plant in Henderson’s industrial district, and went to work as a janitor. He was not amused, but undeterred, he wisely kept his disappointment to himself.

He also immersed himself in Southern Nevada politics, working on campaigns and becoming an active member of the NAACP. In his mind, Governor Sawyer had more than stepped up on behalf of Nevada’s black population. But Neal also noticed progress was painfully slow. At the local level, life for working-class blacks was largely unchanged. They weren’t getting hired for front-of-the-house jobs in the casino business, were never quite “right” for government assignments, and were marginalized politically by splintered districts that all but assured a black candidate could not get elected.

He was also quickly learning the ugly underside of the local civil rights scene. Others were running for office, and clearly taking personal advantage of their higher profiles in the community.

“Most black people who came to Las Vegas from Tallulah, Louisiana, in the forties into the early sixties, had not participated in the political process, including myself,” Neal said. “Politically, they were prime targets to be taken advantage of.” The same could be said for those migrating from Fordyce, Arkansas, and small towns in Mississippi.

Neal thought that McMillan, a groundbreaking civil rights leader, was not shy about promoting himself, his business, and his allies while calling for historic racial change. A supporter of U.S. Senator Howard Cannon, McMilllan used the soft-spoken former fighter pilot’s need for a spokesman on the Westside to help young Robert Archie receive patronage jobs in Washington, D.C., and entrance into Howard University. Archie eventually graduated from law school and worked for several years as a member of Cannon’s Senate staff.

The mercurial McMillan’s relationship with Cannon cooled considerably in the run-up to the federal passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As recounted in former Cannon staffer Michael Vernetti’s portrait of the senator, McMillan complained that his former political ally “was just one of the ‘good old boys’ and he never did do anything for civil rights or black people that was visible.” Vernetti added, “Sometimes gratitude is fleeting.” Neal would recall McMillan years later complaining that Cannon hadn’t done enough to help him salvage a business investment that had soured.

Not yet thirty years old, Neal found himself pulled by several forces into Southern Nevada politics. He was active in the Democratic Party, which had begun to appreciate the advantages of a registered black population motivated to go to the polls. He volunteered for the ’62 Sawyer and ’64 Cannon campaigns and appreciated their rhetoric on civil rights. Shaped by his upbringing, education, and participation in the historic Madison Parish voter registration lawsuit, Neal was also seeking real change.

All those things informed his decision to run for elected office in 1964, but in a quiet moment it was the righteous, chiding voice of J.K. Haynes from the Louisiana New Teachers Association that put him over the top: “You can’t even vote where you are from.”

Westside community leaders such as Charles Keller and James McMillan wanted to see a qualified black run for every open active seat. As McMillan would recall in his oral history, “Joe Neal also ran for an office at that time, his first stab at politics. We had a big old wagon on the Westside, and all our politicians came up on the thing and made speeches, and people came to hear them.” Although Neal would choose to run for the state Assembly, he also considered taking a shot at a North Las Vegas City Council seat.

Behind the scenes, more than one political expert whispered, “Just don’t put your face on your campaign material.”

“As if white people would not know if they were black,” Neal recalled of his first legislative campaign. “I thought this was a ridiculous idea. I met an older gentleman whom I called Mr. Jackson. He owned a building on Jackson Street. Many years later it would be converted to a barbershop. I do not recall how or why Mr. Jackson became involved with me in my campaign. He took me down to Marc Wilkinson Printing and had fifty posters made. I tacked these posters up across town. I remembered putting one of these posters out near the Joe W. Brown Racetrack (near the current site of the Las Vegas Country Club). At the time, I believe Sahara might still have been called San Francisco Street. This action of putting up posters with my picture on them across town caused those persons who claimed to be the overseers of the black community at the time to run a person by the name of Leo Johnson. They put his picture on posters with the same color as mine, and made Leo’s posters a little bigger than my posters. This was supposed to have the effect of overshadowing me. Neither one of us won, but I had made my point.

“There was no need for any of us to hide.”

But in frank retrospect, it might not have helped him win many white votes. The good news for black residents in 1960 was the election of fellow African American Helen Lamb Crozier to the State Board of Education.

How did she do it? In part, due to her politically potent middle name. Lamb was a well-known name in Nevada politics, with brothers Floyd, Ralph and Darwin Lamb all holding office within a few years of each other. Helen Crozier chose not to have her image depicted on her political placards, and she prevailed.
“At the time of the election of Helen Lamb Crozier, other than her immediate family, no one in the community, as I recall, knew that she was black,” Neal said.
Neal took out a small advertisement in the Las Vegas Sun spotlighting the need for a public defender in Clark County and a law school for the state. Until 1963, becoming a lawyer in-state was a matter of apprenticing under an established attorney and readying for the bar exam. Clark County district judge John Mowbray, with funding from the Ford Foundation, helped create the local public defender’s office. A young attorney named Richard Bryan, who would go on to become a governor and U.S. senator and one of Nevada’s most beloved and respected political figures, was named the community’s first public defender.
The early years of Neal’s political activism were punctuated by the April 1964 visit to Southern Nevada by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke before a large crowd at the Las Vegas Convention Center on the topic of the nonviolent pursuit of civil rights. The racially blended crowd was enthusiastic, and few noted the irony of a black man speaking in a place that had not so long ago been as segregated as Selma. With the local NAACP chapter playing host, and Bob Bailey reminiscing with King about their time as classmates at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, the event was an undeniable success.

Like so many positive moments that made inspiring headlines, it was hard to measure the lasting impact of King’s visit. Neal remained inspired not only by King, but by Ella Baker and her organization of the increasingly assertive Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which engaged in college campus sit-ins. Like many others of his generation, Neal was angered by racial injustice and drawn to the action-oriented SNCC with its impassioned speakers Julian Bond, John Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael.

He was also an admirer of U.S. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, after first reading about him during his military service. By 1964, Neal joined an army of Southern Nevada volunteers in support of the Lindon B. Johnson-Humphrey ticket. Neal said he was further impressed after meeting Humphrey at New York’s Waldorf Astoria that same year and a decade later after hearing him speak at a pharmaceutical convention in Las Vegas. “I saw Hubert as a man willing to fight for the rights of black folks when they were not able to fight for themselves,” he reflected many years after that first meeting.

Neal participated in the political process, but he also had a living to earn. In the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he decided to seek a better job than janitor at Titanium Metals Corporation in Henderson.

After opening Neal’s work file and noting the résumé, the personnel officer said wryly, “Your degree is not working for you.”

A few days later, he received word that he’d been promoted to “ingot inspector,” a brutally physical job involving quality-testing titanium blocks weighing several tons. The position in the Engineering Division paid better, but it wasn’t exactly challenging. But Neal became proficient, and not long after was hired by Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company (REECo), as the company’s equal rights compliance officer at a time when many employers and supervisors throughout the community were blocking hiring for blacks and other minorities.

If the casino bosses could be outed for their segregationist practices, so could officials in the building trades and construction industry. And REECo was also a major player at the Nevada Test Site.

Neal began to hit his stride at work, and he found his life partner in Estelle Ann DeConge, whom he’d met in the library at Southern a few years earlier. The couple was wed in a brief ceremony on the morning of May 29, 1965, at historic Saint Columba Catholic Church in Oakland, California. The church itself provided inspiration to the newlyweds: it was founded in 1898, and through the decades, according to its website, had seen its congregation transition from Irish and Italian to black and Hispanic. In the decades to come, the Neals continued to attend regular services at Saint James the Apostle Catholic Church on H Street.

Joe’s job at Titanium was in transition, and Estelle was busy completing her internship as a dietitian at the VA hospital in Long Beach, California. After completing her internship, she returned to Southern Nevada, where the couple took up residency on Alwill Street. Estelle had the distinction of being Nevada’s first black dietician, and she continued her career while eventually juggling the duties of a mother of four.

Estelle and Joe’s first child, Charisse Marie, was born November 17, 1965, at a time of great tumult in the Southern Nevada civil rights movement. It was all pretty confusing for a youngster.

“I remember there was a time when Dad had to hide us downstairs because someone had thrown a rock in the yard or tried to burn up the yard. It was frightening,” Charisse recalled. “We had to go down to the lower level. All we heard was a lot of noise and yelling.” Other times she remembered her father receiving phone calls late at night, then putting on his overcoat and announcing, “I’ll be back.”

Often as not the political disputes into which Neal was drawn weren’t legislative, but party oriented. He was giving pain to the local building trades unions by demanding they open up real opportunities for minority apprentices. He was pushing the Democratic Party into being more inclusive of persons of color not just on the ground but in the county and state hierarchy.

At home, “He was always loving, my dad, but he taught us that education was the thing,” Charisse said. “I remember asking him for a toy and him saying, ‘No, why don’t you get a book?’ At school we got the Scholastic book list and had to pick out and order a book. Instead of buying us an expensive toy, he’d take the amount of that toy and buy us ninety-nine-cent books. I was always the one in class with the most books when it was time for them to be delivered to the classroom.

“Now, of course, I’m glad my dad put education in our home. God was first, and then it was education. He’d say, ‘You put your friends last. They’ll be there for you. You have to build you up first. He taught us how to love, in spite of the hatred and the prejudices that were out there in the world. He taught us how to love past it.”

Charisse thought her parents were very brave in a world that at times seemed to want nothing more than to see them quit fighting. “We were taught to get your education and always face fear head-on,” she said. “Trust God. What you’re going to do is going to come to pass. My dad, he lived that in front of us. We had a chance to see him face hatred, not only in the news articles and later at the Legislature, but even in our home. We all have that fight of my dad in us.”
Joe Neal knew that the only real way out of poverty for blacks and other second-class citizens was through education, workplace opportunity, and political clout.

A change was coming to the casino industry that would write a new chapter in Las Vegas history and help lead Joe Neal to the decision to try again for political office.

Change arrived by train on Thanksgiving 1966, not long after Sawyer lost his bid for reelection to Paul Laxalt, who never appeared to lose much sleep over civil rights. Billionaire Howard Hughes, and agent of change, could have helped usher in a new era of racial accord in the casino industry, but instead his racial paranoia and political intrigues helped set back blacks a decade.

Not every battle generated banner headlines and community outrage. Some of the toughest fights were at the micro-political level in an attempt to get the black community a public recreational facility taken for granted in better neighborhoods.


In the late 1960s, Neal was part of a group of citizens that managed to push approval for the Reverend Prentiss Walker Memorial Pool, in tribute to the dedicated leader of the Greater Faith Baptist Church. The North Las Vegas City Council had little difficulty approving the project in concept, but when it was time to fund its construction, there never seemed to be enough cash on hand. Neal fought with little success to augment the funding through the Legislature as the North Las Vegas council dragged its feet.

“We’ve been patient, but we’re getting tired of asking for that pool,” Neal told council members, who rose in offense at his abrupt manner. “We’re well aware of our numbers in this community, and if we have to use these numbers, we will.”

After a decade, the ground was finally broken. The pool was built. Children in the predominantly black neighborhood would have a place to swim. All it took was ten years and overt political threats from Joe Neal.
 

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