Sammy Davis Jr. and the Segregated Strip

Sammy Davis Jr. could sell out the Copa Room at the Sands and earn more in a week than most Americans made in a year. He could not stay in the hotel as a guest or swim in its pool.

In February of nineteen sixty, Davis, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop performed eleven consecutive nights at the Sands while simultaneously filming what would become Ocean's Eleven by day. The engagement became the founding mythology of what people called the Rat Pack. It was also the moment when the specific absurdity of the segregated Strip was most visible: Davis was the most electrifying performer of the group, and he had to find somewhere else to sleep at night.

The pattern applied to every Black performer who headlined the Las Vegas Strip in the nineteen fifties and into nineteen sixty. Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne: they performed for white audiences in hotels they were not permitted to enter as guests. After the performance, they left through service entrances and traveled to rooming houses on the Westside, the Black neighborhood four blocks from Fremont Street where Las Vegas's African American community had built its own parallel economy because the Strip had made itself unavailable.

Davis reportedly told Sinatra he would only agree to perform at the Sands on the condition that the hotel allow him to stay there as a guest. The exact words of that conversation are reported rather than documented. What is documented is the arrangement that did or did not follow from it, and the fact that it took the March nineteen sixty Moulin Rouge Agreement, negotiated under the explicit threat of a public march, to formally change the policy for the entire Strip.

Davis performed in Las Vegas for decades after integration. He never publicly described what it had cost him to do it before.