Charles L. Kellar

Charles L. Kellar was a Las Vegas civil rights leader and attorney whose life's purpose was to end the segregation of Strip hotels and secure equal rights for Black Americans. Born June 11, 1909, in Barbados, he moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, in 1921. He graduated from City College of New York and earned his law degree from St. John's University, beginning his legal career in New York in the 1930s. There, as a colleague of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall - later the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice - he won police brutality cases and secured the reversal of death sentence convictions of Black defendants. He served as president of the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s.

Kellar came to Las Vegas in 1959, but had to struggle simply to earn the right to practice law in Nevada. After taking the bar exam in 1960, he found his name had not been posted among the test results. He fought that action all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court, prevailing in 1965 and finally obtaining his credentials to practice. In the interim he had passed real estate courses at Nevada Southern University - today the University of Nevada, Las Vegas - and worked as a real estate broker until he received his law license.

As chief legal consultant for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Kellar helped bring about the March 26, 1960, accord that allowed Black guests in Strip resorts. He filed the lawsuits that led to the desegregation of Las Vegas schools and overturned local ordinances used to arrest unemployed Black residents. He led the Las Vegas branch of the NAACP in the late 1960s and began the legal work that culminated in the landmark 1971 Consent Decree opening employment in the resort industry. He persisted despite grave intimidation - explosives set off in his office and bullets fired into his home. Charles L. Kellar died June 25, 2002, in Long Beach, California, at the age of 93.