Award puts Vegas woman in company of Rosa Parks, former president

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Aug. 1, 2008 | 2 a.m.

One summer day in 1945, a 13-year-old girl lay down between rows of cotton on the Ivory Plantation in Tallulah, La.

She closed her eyes and dreamed that God was calling to her, making her speak to crowds of people about the way things should be.

Decades later, Ruby Duncan, by then a mother of seven with a ninth grade education, spoke before crowds of poor women on the streets of Las Vegas and to politicians in the halls of power of Carson City and Washington, D.C. She helped bring health care, education, food and jobs to families in Nevada and across the nation.

Duncan, 76, has been recognized with the Margaret Chase Smith award, an annual prize voted on by secretaries of state nationwide and offered in recognition of “acts of political courage.” Al Gore was a finalist for this year’s award. Duncan is in the company of previous winners Jimmy Carter, Rudy Giuliani and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. She will receive the award this winter in Washington, D.C.

The radiant former activist, smiling widely, on Wednesday greeted visitors drawn to her Rainbow Boulevard apartment by news of the award.

To tell her story — and to explain her limp — Duncan settles into an easy chair in a small living room brimming with a lifetime’s other awards, prizes and plaques.

She takes her mind back to the Las Vegas Valley she first saw in 1952 when, having lost her mother to “hard work,” the young woman left Southern sharecropping to join family that had come here following jobs. She became a mother at a young age. Jobs for black women to support a family at the time included cleaning houses, which she did before cleaning Strip hotel rooms.

First there was the Stardust, where she thought it unfair to have to clean 13 rooms a day. “I felt like if you’re going to clean something, it really should be clean,” she recalls.

She was working nights at the Flamingo when her boss asked her to work overtime. “But I had seven children. I wanted to go on home. I told him, ‘I’m not staying. These aren’t slavery times anymore.’ He said I had to stay. I walked.”

Then came the Sahara, where she was a short-order cook. One day she was carrying trays in both hands topped by bowls of food. She never saw the cooking oil on the floor. Duncan fell, injuring her back so badly she couldn’t work. At the time, she was divorcing her husband and had children at home, ages 3 to 12. She began receiving a monthly welfare check of $250.

It was 1969, and she was living in the area known as West Las Vegas, the small village within a city that has long been home to thousands of Southern blacks.

Together with neighbors and friends, she entered a world of midnight visits by welfare inspectors checking for husbands and boyfriends and cutbacks to job training programs for those who most needed them. She and other mothers began comparing notes on these and other shortcomings in federal programs that were supposed to fight poverty.

She soon became a leader as these local mothers joined a growing national movement that linked the words “welfare” and “rights” for the first time.

Duncan remembers one of their early moves. “One day we decided to march on the welfare office. We asked to see their policies, their manual of how they would treat us. They said the state couldn’t do that. So we went up the back steps on a Friday afternoon, went into the director’s office and told him we wouldn’t let him leave.”

She was arrested, and people started noticing her efforts.

Thousands marched on the Strip and into Caesars Palace in 1971, closing down business and drawing national attention to the cause of fair treatment and better services for the poor. This march is the dramatic focus of “Storming Caesars Palace: How black mothers fought their own war on poverty,” by Dartmouth College professor Annelise Orleck.

Orleck says the award’s significance is that “finally we understand that the civil rights movement was a lot bigger and longer than Martin Luther King, as wonderful and important as he was.”

She credits Duncan’s influence for the emergence of a functioning national food stamp program, the rise of women of color in hotel and casino management on the Strip, and job training programs for the poor.

“There are so many levels on which this movement was important, not only statewide, but nationwide,” Orleck says.

“And there’s no question Ruby was in the absolute forefront.”

The arc of Duncan’s work changed considerably following the 1972 founding of a grass-roots organization called Operation Life, which provided such help as health care and job training. For the next two decades, she moved from street-level activism directed at government to running an organization that directly helped women in the community. Her own failing health forced her to drop out of public life in 1990. Operation Life also folded most of its programs shortly thereafter amid dwindling funds and allegations of mismanagement.

Now she says she feels no need to be involved in the intrigue and struggles of her earlier days. Instead, she calls attention to her children.

“All seven got educated,” she says proudly. “As long as they graduated and walked across that stage — that was enough.” None has had to depend on the state or federal government, as she did.

One daughter, Sondra Phillips-Gilbert, followed her path of activism. She was the only child who, even as an 11-year-old, would accompany her mother to meetings and protests.

“I begged to get out of school to go,” she says. “It was exciting to see how poor people could stand up.” Seeing her mother speak in public made a lasting impression on her. “Just the way she looked, you could feel her power. It was so uplifting,” she says.

She went on to work in the Washington, D.C.,-area welfare system for 13 years, a job she liked because she “could empathize” with the mothers who came to her office. Now she runs a new nonprofit organization not unlike Operation Life and is focusing on getting a community center for her northeast D.C. neighborhood.

She becomes emotional when she thinks back on the decades of scratching and clawing her mother took on, for her brothers and sisters and for poor people in general.

“I’m glad she’s finally being recognized for all that she’s done,” she says, weeping softly into the phone.

Despite her own daughter’s good work, Duncan sees a lack of enthusiasm in today’s black America for the activism of her youth.

“There’s no one interested in doing what we did,” she says — even though, she says, she’s never seen “so many people give up homes, so many jobless people.”

Of course, some of tomorrow’s leaders may still be unknown. Michael Flores, a 20-year-old College of Southern Nevada junior, says “Storming Caesars Palace” inspired him to meet Duncan, and meeting her has inspired him to work with other young people on issues such as high school dropout rates and gangs. Flores says he has learned from Duncan, “Don’t take no for an answer.”

Duncan still finds herself dreaming, as she did once in a Louisiana field.

She looks upward, sets her still-strong hands on her lap. “Dear God,” she exclaims, “let somebody make me wealthy before I leave — just for one year.”

“I would buy me a nice home, in a decent neighborhood. I would have me a better car. I would love to go to one of those hotels, lay up and have a massage. I would go to Paris, London, Italy. I would live for once in my life.”