Well it looks like Senator Harry Reid is at it again. you remember how I commented about the NAACP giving Senator Reid an "A" in Congress report card | more HERE and HERE. Well, it appears that Senator Reid is spreading a bit of "little white lies" this time with regard to his role in the integration of the Vegas Strip.
Get this as reported by Steven Friess at AOL News, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who last month apologized for privately praising President Barack Obama's lack of a "Negro dialect," posted a Black History Month essay on his Web site Monday in which he takes credit for racial integration in Las Vegas.
One problem: Some local black leaders and historians don't remember him having had a significant role in that effort and the senator himself made no reference to it in his 2008 memoir.
Get this as reported by Steven Friess at AOL News, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who last month apologized for privately praising President Barack Obama's lack of a "Negro dialect," posted a Black History Month essay on his Web site Monday in which he takes credit for racial integration in Las Vegas.
One problem: Some local black leaders and historians don't remember him having had a significant role in that effort and the senator himself made no reference to it in his 2008 memoir.
President Barack Obama, right, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(Jason Reed/Reuters)
There is more, In the essay, which was also published as an opinion piece for the black-issues Web site The Grio under Harry Reid's byline, the Senate majority leader wrote: "I worked hard during my time in local politics in Nevada to integrate the Las Vegas strip [sic] and the gaming industry."
Yet Joe Neal, a former Democratic state senator who was a key figure in the civil rights movement in Nevada, was baffled by the claim. For one thing, Reid was only 20 when a famous 1960 meeting between casino owners, progressive government officials and NAACP leaders resulted in an accord to integrate Las Vegas casinos for customers.
The Nevada Legislature passed a civil rights act in 1965, but Reid did not become a member of that body until his 1966 election as an assemblyman. And a federal court decree in 1971 that set quotas for the hiring of minority casino workers was negotiated by the U.S. Department of Justice and handed down just months after he was sworn in as lieutenant governor.
Reid spokesman Jon Summers responded to questions about the claim with a one-sentence e-mail: "He and Mike O'Callaghan worked together as governor and lieutenant governor to apply pressure on business leaders to integrate the industry." Reid served as lieutenant governor under O'Callaghan for one term, from 1971 to 1974, before leaving the post for his first, unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate.
When pressed for specifics, Summers pointed to a Politico piece from June 2008 in which Reid told a journalist he helped negotiate the 1971 settlement that required casinos to begin hiring blacks in hotel casino jobs other than as maids and porters.
"I don't recall him being involved in any of that," said Neal, the first black state senator and first black gubernatorial nominee from a major party when the Democrat lost in 2002. He attended several meetings related to the federal settlement and was heavily involved as the state's top elected black official. "I don't think he would have an involvement" in the federal court decree.
Historians who have studied the era were similarly uncertain to what Reid referred. A 2004 doctoral dissertation [pdf] by sociologist Jeffrey J. Sallaz specifically examined the outcome of that federal decree and didn't reference either O'Callaghan or Reid. Instead, Sallaz laid out the history as a tussle between federal authorities and casino executives.
Read the whole article HERE.
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