How the 1969 Uprising Challenged Police Brutality in Las Vegas

This post is part of our forum on the Urban Rebellions of the 1960s

On the evening of October 5, 1969, Gerald Davis stepped out of his house in West Las Vegas to fix his mother’s car and noticed police officers had pulled over a taxicab nearby. Known by residents as the “Westside,” this Black-majority area is located west of downtown, literally divided by the railroad tracks running through the city. Patrol vehicles were a familiar sight on the Westside, though younger residents claimed the police seemed less interested in civil service and more prone to brutality and intimidation. The Black driver appeared nervous. Davis approached his vehicle attempting to calm the situation. After a brief interaction he journeyed back toward his mother’s vehicle to check the engine, but he noticed one of the officers, a Black man named Robert Arrington, was following him.

Arrington aggressively shouted, “What is it that you said?” Davis briefly replied, “I’m not talking to you.”¹ The officer accused him of muttering something under his breath and again demanded an answer. Reportedly, Davis eventually responded, “You m—f—ing cops is always jumping on us people.”² Tensions quickly escalated. Davis’ relatives within the neighborhood saw the interaction and some of them physically intervened as the officer attempted to detain him on the street. The young man returned to his car, but as he opened the door Arrington drew his service revolver in a belief that Davis reached for a weapon. The young man surrendered and put his hands on the vehicle as Arrington searched him and called for backup.

A crowd soon formed as patrol vehicles descended upon the area. Gerald’s younger brother, Mike Davis, heard the commotion and acquired a shotgun, warning the officers, “If y’all don’t leave off this porch now, you won’t be able to leave.”³ Though a bold statement, Gerald later claimed that Mike’s gun was empty and he was not prepared for a shootout. But the sentiment was sincere. Exhausted by the treatment they experienced at the hands of law enforcement, the Davis brothers’ noncompliance exemplified philosophies of the late-1960s.

The local dynamics of this altercation followed analogous undercurrents throughout the country, as Black neighborhoods that were similarly isolated and marginalized rose against the police state.

The newfound motivation to challenge the heavy hand of Vegas law enforcement was connected to this broader social climate. Arrington’s abuse of power exemplified the realities of police harassment in West Las Vegas and some residents determined more drastic measures were necessary to fight against an occupying force.

Arrington’s partner, a fellow Black officer named Samuel Craig, sensed the volatility of the situation and asked Gerald if they could enter the house and speak peacefully. Though willing to comply with Craig, the young man said Arrington was not invited before slamming the door behind him. Multiple officers then forcibly entered the home. The women in the house attempted to push them back, but the officers maced everyone and took the brothers into custody. By this point, twelve additional policemen occupied the area and the crowd had swelled to an “excess of 50.”⁴ Word spread that the officers had roughed up the women. Witnesses knew that Arrington’s aggression was due to his own pride, rather than the young man’s actions, as he instigated this confrontation without any clear provocation.

For those witnessing the event unfold, the narrative was straightforward. Davis was within his rights in refusing to speak to the police, but Arrington still followed him and applied an aggressive posture that demanded conformity. They watched the officers kick down the doors to the home and mace the women preventing their entry. Shortly after, the brothers were booked in the city jail on charges of “disorderly conduct” (and in Mike’s case, “assault with a deadly weapon”). As word spread throughout the community groups of young people, primarily Black and male, “felt something…come over them,” and they initiated, at the time, the largest uprising in the city’s short history. A young man named Larry Stovall explained it succinctly, “We are not going to stand for it anymore. We are going to take action.”⁵

Groups of Black youth organized at a nearby shopping center. Seeking to contain the uprising, Mayor Oran Gragson established a curfew from 7pm-6am and police established blockades to obstruct protesters from entering the tourist-rich Downtown. Such tactics of containment signaled how the redlining of the 40-Block area allowed law enforcement to contain and immobilize Black resistance at the government’s whim. But the demonstrations continued and the destruction was amplified by the police presence. Flames and broken windows consumed buildings throughout the Westside over the next few nights. Protestors smashed windows and threw Molotov cocktails at police cars and unfamiliar vehicles driving through the area. Gragson placed the national guard on standby and sharpshooters were positioned on rooftops.

For three nights sections of the Westside were consumed by flames, and this event sent a loud message to the Mayor’s office: the status quo of racist police abuse was no longer tolerable and the new generation would make its presence felt if the governing bodies refused to listen.

Political leaders attempted to quell the uprising, or, at the very least, downplay its significance to the public. Gragson naively claimed the incident was “not racial” since both the suspects and arresting officers were Black. Nevada’s first Black assemblymen, Woodrow Wilson, found himself in a verbal altercation with the young protestors who called him an Uncle Tom during a townhall. Justice Robert Mullen, Nevada’s first African American in the judiciary, attempted to converse with the resistant youth, but he was met with a bottle to the head from a member of the crowd. In the case of the Las Vegas uprising, it was less important if the state agent was Black or white, as they still represented institutions that amplified white supremacy, economic divestment, and geographic isolation. At the conclusion of the uprising on Oct. 8, reports noted two people died, over one hundred were arrested, and many sustained injuries.

The uprising sparked numerous reports searching for the root cause of the problem, and such analyses made it clear that the Westside’s issues were building decades before October 1969. Black Las Vegans long condemned police harassment in their community and decried how the area’s infrastructure lagged behind white neighborhoods. But their cries were rarely acknowledged by city leaders. The Westside’s persistent underdevelopment was deliberate, as it was predicated upon a racist vision for the city’s growing tourist clientele. As far back as the 1930s, Mayor Ernie Cragin forced Black residents in downtown to move their businesses into the underdeveloped “McWilliams Townsite” west of the railroad tracks. If they failed to comply, their licenses would be revoked and the state would forcibly remove them. For the next three decades Las Vegas enforced segregationist policies that barred African Americans from purchasing homes outside the boundaries of West Las Vegas and its residents were relegated to the lowest paying, “back-of-the-house” positions within the casinos. The blatant enforcement of  racial segregation was noticeable to anyone who paid attention. In 1960 the NAACP proclaimed it was the “fifth worst Jim Crow area in the nation” and Black residents nicknamed Vegas the “Mississippi of the West.”⁶

Though civil rights activists fought to desegregate Las Vegas in March of 1960, it did little to change the Westside’s economic conditions throughout the decade. Research conducted in 1966 noted that “wide discrepancies” still persisted between the income levels of Black and white families in Las Vegas. The average African American household made $4510 compared to $8145 for white households.⁷ The reason for these stark differences were obvious to Westside residents, but the area’s isolation from the larger population rendered them nearly voiceless in municipal politics. Clearly, desegregation on its own had failed to address the institutional problems impacting Black people and such frustrations reached a boiling point by the decade’s end.

If nothing else, the 1969 uprising forced government leaders to publicly recognize that the problems in West Las Vegas were far broader than a traffic stop. They were imbedded within the structural issues highlighted by the Kerner Commission report published in 1968. It was the lack of recreational facilities available to young people, consistently high unemployment rates, employment discrimination, and the daily harassment from law enforcement that sparked the resistance. Having faced police brutality and economic divestment for multiple decades, the younger residents of West Las Vegas determined that measures beyond nonviolence were necessary to capture attention. It was a compelling moment where young people initiated their own movement to make their voices heard, and it is past time this piece of Las Vegas history gains a broader position in both local and national histories of the city.

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