Posted on: January 6, 2023, 07:04h.
Final up to date on: January 5, 2023, 04:38h.
The reality of racism’s shameful blight on Las Vegas historical past is dangerous sufficient. No embellishment is important.
But, based on memes and articles posted recurrently to social media and the web, your entire swimming pool on the Final Frontier Resort was as soon as drained and cleaned as a result of African-American entertainer Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe into it.
The incident is claimed to have taken place in April 1953, again when all of Las Vegas was segregated. Dandridge’s act is described as a protest that angered racist lodge execs, who felt {that a} Black particular person’s toe dirtied water ultimately.
Dandridge – who was about to grow to be the primary African-American actress nominated for a finest actress Oscar (for the 1954 film Carmel Jones) – was singing on the Final Frontier in her personal lounge act on the time. In response to the 1999 HBO film, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, the entertainer accessed the pool throughout her historic keep as its “first Negro visitor.”
Although the pool-draining story looks like one thing that might have occurred throughout such a bigoted period, no credible proof means that it ever did. In reality, it’s extremely doubtless that it didn’t.
Fantasy Interpretation
To start with, 1953 appears early for Dandridge to have been welcomed to remain on the Final Frontier. Again then, individuals of shade couldn’t keep, gamble, or dine in any Las Vegas on line casino accommodations. This was true even of admired Black headliners. Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis, Jr. all needed to slip in by means of stage and kitchen doorways to carry out, and depart the identical manner after taking their bows.
Entertainers of shade have been compelled to guide rooms at boarding homes on Las Vegas’ Westside, the historic African-American group 5 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip. Probably the most renown was run by entrepreneur Genevieve Harrison, whose Harrison Home is now listed on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations.
In response to a number of sources, probably the most professional being Smithsonian Journal, the one early exception to this rule was made for Lena Horne – and solely as soon as. This story alleges that Horne was solely allowed to remain on the Flamingo after issuing a gutsy ultimatum to mobster proprietor Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel: both she be allowed to remain there or he must discover a new grand-opening headliner. So, for 3 nights simply after Christmas 1946, Siegel hid Horne out in an remoted cabana, ordered her to not enter the on line casino, and had the maids burn her bedsheets and towels upon her departure.
It wasn’t till the Moulin Rouge – Las Vegas’ first absolutely built-in on line casino lodge – opened on the Westside on Could 24, 1955 that the city’s racist mindset started altering. The Moulin Rouge instantly entered Hollywood gossip columns as the most well liked nightclub on the town – a cultural Valhalla the place one might rub elbows with Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Rosemary Clooney, and witness impromptu late-night jam classes that includes singers Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, and Billie Vacation.
A style of how far we’ve come as a society is supplied by this sentence in regards to the Moulin Rouge, revealed by Selection in 1955: “This uncommon spot continues to tug within the playing sect, who aren’t alarmed within the least about rubbing elbows and cube in combined racial firm.”
No First-Hand Account
An excellent greater gap within the pool-draining story is that Dandridge – who died of an antidepressant overdose in September 1965 at age 42 – by no means as soon as talked about it whereas she was alive. Although her autobiography is often cited as a supply for the story, Every thing and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy (which was compiled from taped interviews by writer Earl Conrad and revealed in 1970) doesn’t point out it in any respect.
In reality, the pool-draining story doesn’t seem in a single guide, newspaper, or journal till 1999, 34 years after Dandridge’s loss of life. That’s when it was detailed within the biography, Dorothy Dandridge: An Intimate Portrait of Hollywood’s First Black Movie Star, by her former supervisor, Earl Mills. This was the guide tailored for the HBO biopic starring Halle Berry as Dandridge in a Golden Globe-winning efficiency, which is how the pool-draining scene burned itself into the world’s consciousness as truth.
Casting much more doubt are a number of alternate variations of the pool-draining story which have circulated over the a long time, every naming a special Black Vegas entertainer of the day because the alleged pool consumer. Within the second hottest model, it was Sammy Davis, Jr. who dared to swim on the Sands in 1952, prompting its pool’s draining and cleansing. This model of the story seems in each Charles Fleming’s November 1999 Los Angeles Journal article, “Viva Black Vegas,” and in A&E’s 1999 documentary, The Rat Pack.
Is it potential the identical vile act was perpetrated towards two African-American singers in Las Vegas? Sure, it’s potential. Besides that Davis, like Dandridge, by no means as soon as publicly talked about a pool-draining incident throughout his lifetime – although he did inform a narrative about being requested to go away a Las Vegas pool within the ’50s – not due to his pores and skin shade however as a result of he was drawing a crowd out of the on line casino and into the pool space. (The anecdote appeared in his 1966 autobiography, Sure I Can.)
Additionally, Claytee White, director of the Oral Historical past Analysis Middle at UNLV Libraries, advised On line casino.org she remembers listening to two different variations of the pool-draining story, claiming it occurred to each Horne and Belafonte. (Although not ironclad proof, a narrative that spreads in several variations – very similar to in a recreation of phone – is suggestive of an city fable.)
What Draining a Pool Entailed within the 1950s
The Final Frontier pool held about 50,000 gallons of water. In 1953, it could have taken about 24 hours simply to empty, then one other 50 hours to refill, utilizing a 5/8-inch-diameter hose delivering 17 gallons per minute.
“We all know that inferior pool know-how within the 1950s would make draining a pool a prolonged and intrusive job – one that may doubtless make different friends upset,” wrote Elexus Jionde, writer of the 2017 guide The A-Z Information to Black Oppression, in a 2018 weblog titled “The best way to Examine Historical past: The Dorothy Dandridge Pool Incident.”
“We learn about different racist incidents involving swimming pools, eating places, and accommodations in the course of the mid-20th century,” Jionde continued. “It could possibly be potential that Earl Mills conflated Dorothy’s life with that of notorious situations of pool racism (just like the acid throwing on the Monson Motor Lodge swimming pool).”
In June 1964, James Brock, the supervisor of that St. Augustine, Fla. motel, poured muriatic acid right into a “whites solely” pool to be able to frighten Black anti-segregation protesters into leaving it.
“Perhaps lodge employees threatened to empty the pool if Dorothy tried to swim,” Jionde wrote. “However it’s extremely unlikely (when weighing the whole lack of major and secondary proof) that the pool was drained due to a toe, or perhaps a swim. As an alternative, it’s more likely that the employees made a dramatic menace, and/or Earl Mills simply needed so as to add some pizzazz to Dorothy’s life story.”
We’ll depart the ultimate say to Snopes.com. The actual fact-checking web site ascribes its “legend” score to the Dandridge story. This describes “occasions so normal or missing intimately that they may have occurred to somebody, someplace, at a while, and are subsequently unprovable.”
Search for “Vegas Myths Busted” each Friday on On line casino.org. Click on right here to learn beforehand busted Vegas myths. Obtained a suggestion for a Vegas fable that wants busting? E-mail corey@casino.org.
