Ruby Duncan, one of the most effective advocates for Nevada’s poor and racially oppressed, has died. She was 93. She won national fame in the 1970s by organizing a welfare rights march that temporarily halted gambling at Caesars Palace, then the plushest casino on the Strip. Duncan also was a founder of the anti-poverty agency Operation Life and helped establish a medical clinic in the heart of Las Vegas’ impoverished West Side.
Duncan died at Spring Valley Hospital on Sunday morning, according to her granddaughter Libra Duncan.
Duncan was born in poverty June 7, 1932, near Tallulah, Louisiana, the daughter of sharecroppers. Her parents died before she was 4 years old, and she grew up in the homes of relatives. She and other black children worked the fields of white-owned Ivory Plantation from May through October every year. They attended school from November through April, a shorter school year than was provided for white children. She dropped out after the ninth grade to work full-time as a waitress and barmaid, and said that even after several years her earnings never exceeded $9.50 a week. In 1953, the prospect of better pay drew her to join an aunt in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas at the time was a “Jim Crow” town where many businesses refused to serve blacks; most neighborhoods and schools were segregated in fact, though not by law. Duncan worked as a maid, first in private homes and then in a hotel. She was fired in 1964, she claimed for attempting to organize other maids to protest the heavy workload. That resulted in her first experience with “welfare,” the Aid to Dependent Children payments she received to support her family while she tried to get a job.
Duncan later worked several years in the pantry of a Strip hotel, before an on-the-job injury ended her ability to do the heavy pantry work. She enrolled in a job-training program to develop other skills, but the program was abruptly canceled by Nevada’s Welfare Division.
Las Vegas Valley political leaders mourned Duncan’s death on Sunday.
“Her legacy of justice and compassion will continue to be taught to generations of North Las Vegas students at Ruby Duncan Elementary School,” North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown said in a statement.
Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley said the civil rights leader will be missed.
“I have known & loved Ruby since I was a teenager,” Berkley wrote in a post on X. “I’m honored to have called her a friend. She helped make this community a better place to live for all of us. She fought for those who needed help.”
Pushed to microphone
In 1969, the frustrated Duncan was persuaded to attend a meeting of ADC mothers, and was selected one of the group’s representatives to visit the Nevada Legislature and protest the inadequate size of the ADC grants.
When nobody else was willing to speak at the hearing, Duncan was pushed to the microphone and made an effective presentation, though she later admitted she could not remember what she said. As a result she was elected president of the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization, the local affiliate of a national movement which asserted — a then-controversial position — that participation in welfare programs was the right of impoverished citizens, rather than a privilege to be granted or withheld according to some administrator’s judgment.
In spring 1971, when the administration of newly elected Democratic Gov. Michael O’Callaghan cut a third of the recipients from welfare rolls, and cut benefits for the rest, both the local and the national group took to the streets. Organizing a protest complete with radical celebrities — the most photogenic being actress Jane Fonda — WRO members and sympathizers marched most of the length of the Las Vegas Strip, then took a right turn through the casino of Caesars Palace. Dealers covered the racks of chips and shut down the games for more than an hour on a peak-season Saturday.
War on poverty
A week later, the protesters marched the Strip again. Within weeks, a federal judge ordered the state to restore the cuts, but other cuts and other demonstrations, some involving scores of arrests, would continue for years. Throughout that period, Duncan would be the pleasantly smiling but insistent face of the welfare rights movement.
In 1971, McCall’s magazine named her one of the nation’s outstanding women for her efforts. And the long struggle was recounted by Dartmouth College professor Annelise Orleck in a scholarly but readable book, “Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty.”
In 1972, she helped found and became the executive director of Operation Life, a local organization which extended multiple services to the poor of West Las Vegas, the mostly Black neighborhood lying north of Bonanza Road, west of the Union Pacific Railroad Tracks, and east of Rancho Drive. One of its accomplishments was establishing a wellness clinic where poor mothers and their children could get basic medical care. Eventually, the Clark County Health District took over and continued operation of the clinic.
Operation Life eventually folded its programs as funding dried up in the 1990s, amid allegations of mismanagement. But Duncan claimed that an administrator of University Medical Center told her it was the inspiration for the UMC Quick Care Clinics that are now the go-to places for Southern Nevada’s the moderately injured or suddenly ill.
By the time Operation Life closed, Duncan had withdrawn from public life because of medical consequences related to the old on-the-job injury.
Interviewed by a Las Vegas Review-Journal representative in June 2015, Duncan said she was never motivated by desire to get anything free.
“I had always worked, and what I really wanted was to get retrained for something I could do after getting hurt. But they told me to go home.”
Asked of which accomplishment she was proudest, she answered, “Making sure I got all my children through high school and college and making sure they could be what they wanted to be. One of them, David, was very young when he said, ‘I want to be a lawyer ‘cause you’re always getting arrested and I could get you out of jail.’ And he is one now.”
For the children
Her second-proudest accomplishment, she said, was helping implement the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a program providing nutrition to low-income pregnant women, infants, and small children. It is not part of the better-known “food stamp” program.
“Senator (Hubert) Humphrey got WIC passed into law but the states had to ask for grants to implement it,” she explained. “So we had to bring political pressure on the states to get them to ask. Nevada got the first WIC program.” By the mid-1970s, nearly all states had WIC programs.
What she wishes she could have also accomplished would have been “to educate the community more about the needs of children.” And she added with a chuckle, “And also seniors, since I have done got old.”
She believed schools should be tasked with knowing each child’s home-living situation and intervening if necessary.
“If that child doesn’t get anything to eat except at school, he’s not going to learn much,” she said.
Furthermore, she believed Nevada, in 2015, still needed prodding from people like her to do its job.
“There’s a program called Early Screening and Diagnostic, in which all children the division deals with are supposed to get to a pediatrician for health screening before they go to school every year. And State Welfare has no interest in making sure that really happens.”
In 2008, Duncan was honored with the Margaret Chase Smith Award, a prestigious prize given annually for “acts of political courage.” The recipient is selected by the secretaries of state nationwide, and former recipients have included civil rights leader Rosa Parks, child-victim advocate John Walsh, and a whistleblower who exposed public corruption in local government.
She regularly attended Pilgrim’s Rest Missionary Baptist Church.
Duncan was preceded in death by one daughter, Georgia Jones. She is survived by one daughter, Sondra Phillips of Washington, D.C,. She is also survived by five sons: Roy Duncan, David Phillips, Ivory Phillips, Kenneth Phillips, and Ronnie Phillips; all of Las Vegas.
