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