Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1969 West Las Vegas Riots

Preface: 

This all started as a gag. Defector is doing their annual roast of the 32 NFL teams, from worst to best. I'm a very heavy commenter there, I've written short fiction in the comments and occasionally shorter movie reviews that are not worth full publication. Seems like people tolerate my brand of nonsense reasonably well, I've gotten decent upvote scores. For the last couple of years, I've been doing series in the comments of 'Why Your Team Sucks' entries, last year it was short biographies of the worst Americans I could find from each city featured. Let's Remember a (Real Bad) Guy featured people like our traitorous, deeply incompetent General James Wilkinson or arch racists like Hoke Smith or extremely obvious picks like George W. Bush. This year I'm doing Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest!, which are stories about riots, strikes, or just one flat-out military battle in or around each city the football team plays in. Usually these are parts of a city's history that almost nobody remembers, parts of American history very powerful interests would prefer we not think about. They were supposed to be like 300 words max and just real short, informative, sometimes humorous things.

Instead this blew up rapidly and nearly all of them are about 1,500 words or more. They got longer quickly. My weakness as a writer is that I will either write nothing at all, or I'll write way too much. Many of these events were too awful to really keep a humorous tone about, just felt like these under-explored elements of history needed detail, and as accurate of reporting as I could give. It is a ridiculous amount of work to do, especially with a demanding full time job and long commutes, so this is amateur work done quickly and admittedly sloppily. I did get to use my BA in History for something at least. But these 32 riots/battles actually do come together to make a halfway decent history of race and labor relations across 200 years in this country, just out of order. If you ever want to know where my politics come from, it's from knowing about events like these.

Also, people kept asking for an easier way to find them. A lot of comments were like "this is great, how do I find the other ones?" So I'm reposting them here, with some revisions, I did make a few factual errors I want to correct. This first one for the Las Vegas Raiders was done very quickly so it is largely rewritten. The other 31 will come out over the course of the next couple of weeks. Original post can be found here.https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52ahttps://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52a

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America's history is littered with some real unpleasantness and a great deal of it has been forgotten or ignored. Today's subject would be better-remembered if the Raiders still played in a real city like Oakland, but since they moved to a theme park in the desert, we will instead cover the 1969 West Las Vegas Riots, a much more obscure event.

There have been thousands of riots in American cities. In the 1800s, they were very diverse and could be about anything from Shakespeare to vegetarianism to labor tensions. We'll get to many of those stories. But in the 20th century, especially after World War II, riots began to take on a very familiar pattern. We could easily cover 32 events exactly like this one about the same things. I don't want to do that because it will be repetitive and depressing and maybe even pornographic at a certain point. I will cover the major ones such as Detroit (get hype, Lions fans!). But as you read this, know there is a century of history of undesired peoples in urban areas, brutalized by ever-more aggressive policing, and at certain points this explodes. People can easily mock these riots as self-defeating and "destroying their own homes", riots are not usually praxis. They are societies breaking down and do not need to make sense, also there are two actors in a riot: the rioters and the police. Explosions don't just happen, they are made to happen.

 

1969 West Las Vegas is just an example, but just know: this has happened everywhere.

 

Vegas was a boom town through much of the 20th century, and of course, this is America, so even into the middle of nowhere, we need to export our segregation. "The Mississippi of the West" is what the NAACP called Vegas. At first it really was like a Southern colony in the desert. A lot of the mobsters founded it were from an infamous bootlegger lawless resort city pre-Vegas, what is nicknamed "the Free State of Galveston". Galveston being Texas, and that means Jim Crow. Infamously Sammy Davis Jr could perform in Vegas, but was not allowed to say in the hotels. He could sing about gambling in Ocean's 11, but due to his skin color, he could not actually play craps at the Sands or the Riviera. The Civil Rights Movement had to extend this far out into the desert as well and would fight to integrate the main casinos in the 1960s.

 

But what we think of as Vegas is technically unincorporated land in a legal fiction called Paradise, Nevada. It also does not represent the entire city at all. Westside Vegas, on the literal other side of the train tracks, was the poorer, less developed area. It was the black neighborhood neglected by the city, in some cases lacking electricity or plumbing. There was a brief flourishing of a rival "Black Strip" around Jackson Avenue. It had a few nightclubs inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and smaller casinos modeled on "Vegas" (still technically Paradise). However, these businesses seem to have struggled. A very ambitious integrated casino in 1955 called the Moulin Rouge Hotel floundered that same year. People really wanted to make something better of West Vegas, but it never happened. Post-integration, the Black Strip really had no reason to exist. The entertainment venues declined, and this area only kept getting worse.

 

By the late-60s, the country was deeply on edge, and we'll cover a lot of the reasons why. There have been two major waves of urban riots in '67 and '68. African Americans everywhere feel harassed by over-policing and redlining and the predictable problems of the mid-20th century.

 

Today's event begins on Oct. 5th, 1969, when the police pull over a speeding taxi driver in Westside. One of the cops is actually black himself, Robert Arrington, which is rare since police forces were overwhelming white in this era. Meanwhile, a local black man named Gerald Davis just happened to be outside fixing his mother's car and sees his buddy, the taxi driver, in a bad police interaction. Davis probably should not have gotten involved. But when he did, the cops took this very personally. They followed Davis back to his mother's house nearby, saw that he had a legally-owned firearm, and decided to violently arrest him. Then they stormed inside, macing everybody, including his Mom. At this point, 150 onlookers are watching what is a snowballing situation. They begin to chant and protest, since all of them are familiar with this pattern of intimidation and cruelty. This goes on for hours, simmering, but not quite a riot yet. The evening ended with a tense stand-off, hundreds of cops and protesters focused at a strip mall around the corner. The police do retreat, trying to not set this off worse than it has.

 

However, the next day, the 6th, the riots seem to have truly begun. Two white men drove into the strip mall and were beaten by the protestors. The rioters armed themselves with molotov cocktails and were in open revolt against the Vegas police. There is the usual pattern of looting, sniping at police officers, and almost 40 blocks of the city in chaos. The battle would rage for about two more nights, with two deaths on the 8th, both involving an attempting robbery. At this point the West Vegas riots seem to have lost their energy and peace was restored. The mayor never needed to call in the National Guard. It could have been - and was - much worse in other cities.

 

It is very difficult to find sourcing on this riot, there is not even a Wikipedia article on it. I was able to confirm details with local newspaper reports from the time. I am reasonably sure this is accurate. Some events are better-remembered than others. You will find a Wikipedia article on the West Vegas Riot in 1992 in response to the Rodney King verdict (get hype, Rams fans). West Vegas did not feel any better about its place in the social structure decades later. I've been to Vegas a couple of times, each time I stepped off the Strip it felt like I was in Fallout, so I imagine this is still a very rough area.

 

Anyway, 31 teams to go. I'll keep reposting these.