On the evening of September 24, 1957, Nat King Cole was performing in the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. A jazz pianist with a smooth baritone voice, Cole was at the peak of his career. With a string of hit singles like “Mona Lisa” and “Unforgettable,” Cole had become one of America’s favorite singers. In 1956, his popularity had led NBC to make him the star of a musical-variety show, the first African-American to host a nationally broadcast program. That same year, Cole had signed a three-year contract with the Sands Hotel for $500,000 making him one of the nation’s highest paid entertainers. 

Near the end of his show, seen live across the country, Cole did something unusual. With the cameraman in tow, he took the audience on a tour of the Copa Room. Then he introduced the audience to “personalities” critical for the operation of the nightclub. The audience saw the manager of the Copa Room, the maître de, captains, waiters, busboys, waitresses, and chefs, all of whom were white, as were the people attending his show. Cole had revealed to a national audience that he was performing in a segregated casino-hotel.

Why would Nat King Cole make such a move? Few in that era viewed him as an activist fighting for integration in public accommodations.  Indeed, in April 1956, many African-American nightclub performers had criticized him for making a concert tour of the South where most venues were segregated. Then, while performing at the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium on April 10, Cole was attacked by four members of the North Alabama Citizens Council. Branches of this segregationist group had sprung up all across the South after the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision mandating desegregation of public schools. Cole was slightly injured, and the men were arrested.

There was an immediate backlash directed at Cole following the Birmingham incident. According to the New York Times, “a number of Negro circles, embittered by the whole battle over segregation, sharply criticized Mr. Cole for performing before a segregated audience; several Harlem nightclubs took his records off their jukeboxes.” News stories also surfaced that Cole was not a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Cole responded swiftly. Besides paying for a life membership, he told a reporter, “I have always supported the NAACP and other organizations fighting segregation and discrimination.” For example, he pointed out that in November 1955, he had performed at fund raiser for the Las Vegas branch of the NAACP and had “made a sizeable contribution at the same time.” 

More importantly, Cole pointed out that he was a “crusader in my own way.” Specifically, he said that his most important contribution would be to continue performing to both mixed and segregated audiences. “The whites come to applaud a Negro performer like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things. I can help ease the tension by gaining the respect of both races all over the country.”

Cole had encountered segregation in Las Vegas as well as the South since his first appearance in the town called the “Mississippi of the West” in 1949. When he performed at the Thunderbird Hotel, Cole could not stay there and had to find accommodations on the segregated west side of Las Vegas. Like other black performers, he also could not dine, gamble, or attend shows in the resort hotels. Because he was so successful in drawing big crowds, Cole contributed to a change in the local racial dynamic. As his career took off, he was able to negotiate contracts, first at the El Rancho Vegas, and then at the Sands Hotel that gave him and his band access to all the hotel’s accommodations. By 1957, other prominent black singers like Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Sammy Davis, Jr. had similar arrangements.

Still, Cole often could not enter hotels where he was not performing. Earlier in 1957, for example, he tried to enter the recently-opened Tropicana Hotel with local black celebrity Bob Bailey and Al Freeman, the white publicist at the Sands Hotel. When a security guard blocked their entry, Freeman explained, “That’s Nat King Cole.” The guard replied, “I don’t care if it is Jesus. He’s black and he has to get out of here.” The same thing happened to Cole at the Sahara Hotel. Bailey remembered a frustrated Cole, after those incidents, saying “I’m going to keep going until the door’s open and I walk in by myself. I go anywhere in the world I want to go.”

Cole rarely discussed these humiliating circumstances with the press, but in 1955 a Las Vegas entertainment columnist had asked “his views on the Vegas Jim Crow situation.” Cole had offered a cautious response explaining that several black performers, including Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, “have done much to improve public relations here.” Still, “we have a long way to go, but we’ll make it.”

They did “make it” on March 25, 1960, when the local NAACP branch threatened to protest the prevailing segregation in the resort city with a march on the Las Vegas Strip. Fearing the negative publicity that would accompany such a march, the owners quickly agreed that their properties would be open not only to black entertainers, but also to black guests. While Cole’s decision in 1957 to show the television audience that the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel was a segregated nightclub was not directly connected with that significant moment three years later, there is no doubt that it contributed to a developing climate of resistance, making such a move more likely in Las Vegas. An aggressive NAACP leadership team, led by Dr. James McMillan, Dr. Charles West, Lubertha Warden, David Hoggard, and Woodrow Wilson, along with the election of mayor Oran Gragson and Governor Grant Sawyer, both of whom were willing to work to destroy segregation, were the key factors in opening public accommodations in Las Vegas. Still, Cole had offered a powerful message to the nation without saying a word. He had let the camera tell the story of segregation in the resort city. As singer Johnny Mathis later explained, “because of his stature and his carriage and the way he was,” Cole “never put himself in a situation where he was a negative person.” Nat King Cole had used the advantage of his celebrity to advance the cause, and he had done it in a way that reflected his character and soft-spoken demeanor. He was indeed a “crusader,” but in his own way.