VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Sammy Davis Jr. Shattered the Strip’s Color Barrier
Posted on: December 1, 2025, 07:21h.
Last updated on: November 30, 2025, 11:35h.
Sammy Davis Jr. and the other two members of the Will Mastin Trio — his father, Sammy Sr., and his honorary “uncle” and manager, Will Mastin — are widely hailed as the first Black act to perform on the Las Vegas Strip. That performance is almost universally reported as occurring sometime in 1944 at the El Rancho Vegas.
Crapping on sacred cows wasn’t the reason we started this weekly series four years ago. Our intention was merely to expose the hundreds of stories about Las Vegas that turn out to be untrue.
Unfortunately, as much as everyone loves Sammy Davis Jr. — including us! — this is one of those stories. According to our research, the earliest known evidence of the Will Mastin Trio appearing at the El Rancho was an “opening tonight” ad that ran in the Las Vegas newspapers on February 17, 1947.
This alone doesn’t prove the trio didn’t perform on the Strip in 1944. But what makes this widely held belief extraordinarily improbable is that Davis spent the entirety of 1944 in uniform.
Here, he endured brutal racist abuse — beatings and humiliation — from white soldiers and superiors as a member of the 270th Ordnance Company.
His talent for singing and dancing was recognized, however, which led to his assignment into Special Services. This allowed him to entertain his fellow troops, and even to tour.
However, his tours were strictly limited to Army production shows. (One allowed him an extended stay at Camp Roberts, a training base in Monterey County, Calif.)
Then, as today, active-duty personnel were prohibited from accepting civilian employment.
The Will Mastin Trio’s two-year hiatus is confirmed by author Wil Haygood in his exhaustively researched 2003 biography, “In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.”
“They saw a new year — 1945 — come into view,” Haygood wrote of Mastin and Sammy Sr. “Evenings in Los Angeles grew lonely and strangely quiet. Without their Sammy, they felt utterly lost.”
After Sammy was honorably discharged on September 11, 1945, the trio immediately reunited and began rehearsing. Their first show back was in late September or early October in Portland, Ore.
Who Broke the Barrier Then?
Discounting that apocryphal 1944 performance would make Tip, Tap & Toe the first known Black act to perform on the Las Vegas Strip.
According to this essay on Clark County’s website, the tap-dancing trio of Sammy Green, Teddy Frazier and Raymond Winfield headlined the Last Frontier sometime in 1945. (The essay was authored by distinguished historian Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV.)
But that doesn’t mean the Strip didn’t host many other lesser-known performers of color before them.
Black entertainers were routinely left off marquees and out of programs, advertisements and press coverage for fear of offending the racist white Vegas audiences of the era. Many were booked only for “Negro nights,” after-hours sets, or uncredited warm-up slots — none of which were documented.
In fact, Black acts could conceivably have performed as early 1931 at the Red Rooster, the casino and nightclub that beat the El Rancho to the Las Vegas Strip by 10 years.
Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. Visit VegasMythsBusted.com to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.
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