The La Concha Lobby located at 770 Las Vegas Blvd is a striking sight. With its undulating roof swinging in dramatic arches from the ground to delicate apexes and large parabola shaped window panels underneath, the structure resembles more of an organic entity than something fabricated by human hands. Comprised entirely of glass and thin shell concrete, the La Concha embodies its seashell namesake in both color and form. The interior of the lobby is akin to the inside of a dome or a big top tent. The curves of the roof fly high into dome of the interior space and the arched windows fill the white space with light during the day. Hanging lamps illuminate the lobby that now serves as the entry to Las Vegas’ Neon Museum. The space still contains a circular front desk and behind it sits a large decorative plaque of the motel’s distinctive logo and name rendered in sparkling Formica and glass. Originally, the motel had a dramatic neon sign with the same logo posted out front. The sign’s sparkling colors and dramatic neon shapes were right at home with the once plentiful instances of googie design along the Las Vegas strip. Now a multitude of signs are housed behind the La Concha lobby in Las Vegas’ Neon Museum, an archive of the art of hand-blown neon signs that hum their harmonic tone above Sin City.      Googie architecture is defined by a commitment to futuristic stylism, bright colors, and the highlighting of materials like concrete and neon. Las Vegas became the home of a multitude of googie commercial structures in the mid-century. The famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign is a piece of googie design, featuring atomic starbursts rendered in bright neon with modern sans serif fonts. The La Concha is a perfect example of googie with its funky shape, bright interior colors, undulating wave forms, and commitment to eye-catching design.      The man who designed the La Concha Motel was even more remarkable than this striking structure. Paul Revere Williams had been educated at the Los Angeles location of the Beaux Arts Institute and went on to contribute his largest body of work to the American West. He served as architect to the stars of his age, designing houses for Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Desi Arnaz among others. He penned many designs for the Las Vegas cityscape in the mid-century, designing the El Morocco Motel and the Royal Nevada Hotel and Casino, and the Guardian Angel Cathedral. Born in 1894, Williams’ was the first African American man to be admitted into the American Institute of Architects. Its been said that he refined the art of sketching upside down so as to not alienate his white customers by sitting on the same side of the table as them. This speaks to his immense skill as a draftsman and the racial prejudice he lived under. Williams spent his life achieving runaway success in his field while advocating for equality for African Americans.

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Beginning in the 1940’s, Negro Bill Canyon was an official place on the map, located just outside of Moab, Utah. The canyon was named after William Grandstaff. For the  past 20 years, questions have surrounded its controversial name and whether it should be changed out of respect for William Grandstaff or kept in order to maintain history. Ultimately, a federal board voted to change the canyon's name to Grandstaff Canyon in 2017.  William Grandstaff’s life was a bit of a mystery, although some basic facts are known. In the 1830s, William Grandstaff was born into slavery in Shenandoah County, Virginia. During the first 30-40 years of his life, Grandstaff made his way across the country. After a stop in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Grandstaff fought in the Black Brigade of Cincinnati during the Civil War, he made it to the Moab area in 1877. Grandstaff first resided in an abandoned LDS fort that had been constructed during a period of conflict between the settlers and local Utes. Grandstaff was a frontiersman and one of the first non-native settlers in the area. His presence in Moab helped to promote settlement in the area.   Grandstaff ranched, grew crops, and had a large herd of cattle. Due to the stream and trees that provided shade, the canyon was perfect for agriculture and ranching. Local Indigenous people visited the canyon to trade with Grandstaff. Today, this area is used as a beautiful recreational area for local hikers and visitors to explore. By changing the name  of the canyon, its visitors can now hold deeper respect, appreciation, and curiosity for William Grandstaff, one whose legacy is still remembered by the people of Moab.

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Named for Davis Levy, the original owner of many of the cribs that lined the alley in the 1880s, Levy’s Alley ran behind the 600 block of Main Street in downtown Boise. While the alley was not the only restricted district in the city, it was the most notorious, and the majority of Boise’s most famous madams and sex workers lived and worked there. One such person was Agnes Bush, also known as “Queen Aggie,” a Black woman who operated multiple cribs and parlor houses in Boise. Bush was one of Levy’s prior tenants, and after he died, she acquired some of the property for herself and expanded a pleasure business of her own. Bush soon ran multiple rooms in the district, by then nicknamed “Levy’s Alley” after Davis, which she rented out by individual women known as “crib girls.” She was known not only as a successful businesswoman but also as a prominent citizen, and the Idaho Daily Statesman frequently wrote about her charitable acts for the poor and children in need. Bush also made important donations to the city and formed long-standing financial and “friendly” ties with the press and local law enforcement. These relationships were supplemented by expensive gifts such as a diamond-encrusted badge she gave to Boise police chief B. F. Francis and a $250 diamond ring to local journalist C. Miles. These gifts and activities both ensured and announced Bush’s prominent role in Boise, for which she earned the nickname “Queen Aggie.” Agnes Bush stands out because she was a Black woman. As a prominent figure in the Boise community with ties to law enforcement, as well as significant property holdings and wealth, she stands as a curious anomaly in the history of the Treasure Valley and the broader region. Though there was white supremacist activity in the area given Boise’s proximity to Oregon (which white residents established officially as a white-only state in its 1859 constitution), Bush was a major player in her community. Indeed, local government and law enforcement typically tolerated sex workers in Boise until 1909, when national sentiments turned against the traditional practice of relegating sex workers to restricted districts in favor of completely expelling such para-legal practices in the name of public health. That year, Congress passed the Mann Act, and local Boise officials began targeting their city’s sex workers for fear of federal intervention. After being run out of the city, Bush moved to Portland, Oregon to live with one of her sons while she suffered from partial paralysis. In 1910, the Statesman reported her death in Portland and revealed her “real name,” Frances Richardson. Despite how her story ended, Bush’s success and her ties to the community suggest the rich tapestry of people that comprised the state of Idaho’s early years and reflect the fascinating and dynamic time in which she lived.

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Slavery existed across the precontact North American continent even before the first Europeans set foot within the confines of modern Utah. It was an integral part of indigenous societies; captives were regularly taken as spoils of war and thereafter either kept to demonstrate the captor’s power, traded to establish peaceful relations with other tribes, or incorporated into the captor’s tribe to replace lost family members. European colonization and expansion introduced a demand for large numbers of indentured servants or enslaved laborers which the indigenous slave trade adapted to meet. Indigenous slavers equipped with European guns and horses preyed upon neighboring tribes, fueling the depopulation of indigenous peoples through slave raiding, warfare, and disease transmission. Spain officially declared slavery illegal in 1811 but did virtually nothing to eradicate it, and Spanish colonizers sometimes even perpetuated it. Religious fervor from the Reformation further added difficulty: Spanish and other Europeans believed indigenous peoples needed to be “saved” by the “civilizing” influence of Christianity and Western Europe. Claiming charity, colonizers bought and sold their fellow human beings on a grand scale to build new empires. Although technically illegal under Spanish and Mexican rule, the indigenous slave trade flourished in the Great Basin region that became Utah Territory. Ute enslavers raided far and wide as well as close to home for captives whom they bartered to New Mexican traders plying the Old Spanish Trail. The trade in enslaved persons constituted a significant portion of the region’s economy. When members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called Mormon pioneers) arrived in the Great Basin in 1847, they entered a part of the country steeped in the indigenous slave trade. While a few Latter-day Saints themselves claimed ownership of enslaved Black Americans whom they brought to the territory, other Latter-day Saints, sometimes from the American northeast or from Europe, opposed slavery and favored abolition. Euro-American Latter-day Saints initially avoided dealing with slavers, who tortured or killed their captives to excite pity from the settlers.  After some Latter-day Saints tried rescuing a few children from captivity by trading for them, Church leaders encouraged the strategy, and Latter-day Saints’ involvement in the indigenous slave trade became complicit. Motivated by a paternalistic desire to save indigenous captives from their captors, the need for enslaved labor, and religious zeal, Church leadership urged members to buy as many indigenous slaves as they could. Mormon efforts to save indigenous slaves from destitution and make them “pure and delightsome” frequently met no success. The mortality rate for child slaves was exceedingly high, and very few of those taken into Mormon households even survived to maturity. It was rare for Latter-day Saint men to marry indigenous women, and only a few indigenous men are known to have married white women. Under early Utah territorial law, Latter-day Saints could legally acquire indigenous indentures and keep them for up to twenty years as long as they allowed their charges to attend school for three months each year. Slavery in Utah Territory was outlawed on June 19, 1862, when Congress abolished slavery in all federal territories.

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The Fremont Theatre was located inside a hotel of the same name in Las Vegas, Nevada in the 1930s. It was one of the only theaters in town, but visitor attendance was not high enough to keep the Fremont active during the Great Depression period, so it soon fell into disrepair. Irene Dunne, an old film actress, purchased the Fremont, Huntridge, and Guild Theatres and leased them to Gertrude Sperling in 1951. Sperling acquired the theaters as a business endeavor following her divorce, but she quickly found herself out of her depth. For help, she reached out to her daughter and son-in-law, Edythe and Lloyd Katz. Lloyd had a background in the film industry, having worked for several motion picture companies throughout California and Arizona as a film distributor and was well respected in the business. When his mother-in-law signed a twenty-seven-year lease on the Vegas theaters, Lloyd was head of the Eagle-Lion motion picture company in San Francisco. The Katzes agreed to take over the running the theaters, and they relocated from San Fransisco to Las Vegas in 1951. Upon taking over the theaters, he consulted designers from the Bay Area to renovate the Fremont and began hosting artist releases and premieres to increase visitor attendance. Some of the films that had their first screenings at the Fremont later became classics in American cinema, such as Las Vegas Story and Ocean’s Eleven. Lloyd quickly became known as the “P.T. Barnum of Las Vegas”, bringing a vibrant and often star-studded presence to Fremont Street. Beyond hosting high-profile events, the Fremont Theatre was also the first Las Vegas theater to desegregate. Growing up in Vegas during the 1960s, Arne Rosencrantz has fond memories of going out with friends to the Saturday matinee showings at the Fremont. It was one of the only theaters where he, as a Black teenager, did not have to worry about segregation. Lloyd and Edythe Katz were dedicated to the Civil Rights movement and set an example by integrating all three movie theaters under their ownership. Lloyd frequently defended his African American patrons and instructed his workers to let guests sit wherever they pleased, regardless of race. When confronted by disgruntled white patrons, Lloyd refused to change his integration policy. Instead, he continued to provide his African American guests with the same service as their white counterparts. Because of this, the Fremont became a favorite entertainment spot for generations of African Americans in Las Vegas. The Katzes operated the Fremont until 1978 when their twenty-seven-year lease expired. The Fremont closed and was demolished in 1981, but its legacy as one of Las Vegas’ first integrated theater lives on in the hearts of many residents.

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“The name ‘Dixie’ is one of those distinctive things about this part of Utah,” historian Andrew Karl Larson wrote in his 1962 history of the Virgin River Basin of southern Utah. “It is a name much used, indeed overused, it would seem to the casual visitor. Businesses use it; its newspapers have been called after it; its junior college is named for it.” As of 2021, that “junior college” is Dixie State University—though likely not for much longer. In the mid-nineteenth century, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew cotton in southern Utah as part of a Church project to make Utah economically self-sufficient. Although the majority of settlers were from the northeastern United States, a community lore developed claiming many were from the American South, including former slave owners and overseers, chosen because they were familiar with cultivating cotton. The settlers dubbed the region “Dixie,” allegedly in reference to the similarly sunny, cotton-growing South. During the Civil War, although Church prophet Brigham Young assured the United States that “Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution,” a small number of Dixie settlers sympathized with their namesake. For example, local bishop Robert Dockery Covington rejoiced when he heard about Confederate victories. In a similarly sectional spirit, in April 1868—during Reconstruction—local newspaper Our Dixie Times ridiculed a Republican senator for “vot[ing] for negro equality.” The “junior college” was founded in 1911 as Dixie Academy. In 1916 it became Dixie Normal College and later Dixie College, even though school founder and trustee Edward Hunter Snow seemed unlikely to be a Confederate sympathizer. Snow was a northerner, and when he had preached as a Latter-day Saint missionary in the South years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to kill him. However, after Snow’s death in 1932, the campus community increasingly used “Dixie” to mean more than cotton and sunny skies. In 1952, Dixie College changed its mascot from “the Flyers” to “Rodney the Rebel.” In 1959, the community embraced the Confederate battle flag as a secondary school symbol. Then, in 1966, the yearbook’s name changed from The Dixie to The Confederate. For the rest of the century, student costumes, activities, and displays made light of slavery and embraced the Confederacy. Students wore blackface as late as the 1990s and organized “slave days” and mock slave auctions. Confederate battle flags adorned school spirit imagery. These ongoing embraces of the Dixie-Confederate connection paralleled the broader mid-twentieth-century Dixiecrat campaign against the Civil Rights Movement. The school began moving away from Confederate imagery when it retired the battle flag as a school emblem in 1994. In 2005, it replaced Rodney the Rebel as a mascot, and it officially dropped the “Rebels” nickname in 2007 in favor of becoming the Red Storm and later the Trailblazers. Yet the Dixie name stayed. When the college transitioned into a university, the board of trustees voted unanimously on January 13, 2013 to name the school Dixie State University, despite growing grassroots interest in dropping “Dixie.” Multiple donors said they would withdraw funding if “Dixie” wasn’t in the name, and chairman Steve Caplin insisted, “No one on this board or in this administration is aware of any racial discrimination in our past.” Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP and a Black woman, was stunned. “Have they not seen all the blackface, the mock slave auction?” she asked. In 2020, pressure again mounted against the name during a nationwide reckoning on racial justice, and the university commissioned an impact study on “Dixie.” Released on December 13, the study revealed that over a third of out-of-state prospective students believed the Dixie name hurt the university’s reputation. Some expressed discomfort with the idea of wearing Dixie State memorabilia. The next day, the board of trustees voted unanimously to recommend the university change its name. Authorizing a name change fell to Utah’s state legislature, but some representatives and members of the community were reluctant, and others were hostile. While the legislature and community deliberated, the university’s Student Executive Council wrote an op-ed pleading for a new name. They quoted an anonymous alumni who reported,

I have been asked in each of my seven post-grad interviews, ‘Where is Dixie?’ …My first day at each of [three] jobs has been explaining the Dixie name as quickly as possible and only getting neutral or negative responses. On March 4, Utah’s legislature finally passed a bill authorizing a name change, and on March 16 Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill into law. On June 14, 2021, a university committee recommended “Utah Polytechnic State University” as a new name, but community backlash was nearly immediate and trenchantly hostile to a name some argued was too reminiscent of nineteenth-century polygamy. By June 29, the committee withdrew its polytechnic suggestion and instead proposed “Utah Tech University,” which the university decided to move forward with, pending approval from the Utah state board of higher education, legislature, and governor. After more than a century, the name “much used, indeed overused,” would be used one time less.

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