Some of you listening to this may have seen the film
Selma. It depicted Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders in the fight for voting rights. The violence that took place at Selma helped lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Parts of the film were controversial: historians objected to how it depicted President Lyndon Johnson as less supportive of civil rights than he actually was.
The national civil rights movement didn’t just begin with the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the March on Washington, of course. African Americans had been seeking their constitutional rights for generations, with other Americans helping or hindering them. Similarly, Nevada’s African American population had faced ample discrimination and segregation. Perhaps the most famous examples involved performers on the Strip who weren’t allowed to stay at the hotels where they entertained. Sammy Davis Junior recalled performing on the Strip and then having to stay at a boardinghouse in Wes
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Nevada Yesterdays is written by UNLV history professor, Michael Green, and is supported by Nevada Humanities
Recently, we lost Lloyd George, a longtime federal judge for whom one of the downtown federal buildings is named. We also lost a pillar of the Las Vegas community and the legal profession.
He was an almost lifelong Nevadan. He was born in Idaho in 1930 but raised in Las Vegas from childhood. He grew up at Third and Charleston. He went to the Fifth Street Grammar School, across from the federal building named for him. He graduated from Las Vegas High School, now the Academy of the Performing Arts, a block from that building. Among other things, he was a teenaged disc jockey for a local radio station before attending Brigham Young University. Then he went to law school at Berkeley. He had a unique career there. Most law students coveted summer clerkships at law firms. His summer job was as a lifeguard at a hotel pool, usually the Sands. With a twinkle in his eye, he lov