It was the only casino where Blacks could gamble or work front-of-house, and the daily 2:30 am show consistently booked star performers like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.
It opened in the Westside neighborhood in May of 1955 to great success. The Moulin Rouge was Vegas’s first desegregated casino. The meeting’s location symbolized the changes that activists wanted to see in Las Vegas. The Moulin Rouge was Vegas’s first desegregated casino, and the largely Black population of the Westside claimed it as their own. The former casino - usually locked and empty - was the setting for a pivotal meeting where McMillan and other members of the NAACP reached an agreement with Governor Grant Sawyer that averted the threatened demonstration. Black activists were demanding that the Las Vegas Strip be desegregated, and were threatening to march.
On March 26, 1960, James McMillan, president of the Las Vegas NAACP and the first Black dentist in Las Vegas, assembled tables and chairs in the then-defunct Moulin Rouge Casino. Zane Mechem December 2021 Two views of the Moulin Rouge, 1955.
