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The history of race relations in America includes many (unfortunately true) tales of black entertainers and athletes whose talents were avidly capitalized upon and enjoyed by white business people and audiences, while they themselves were treated as second-class citizens. Considered good enough to entertain millions of white Americans on ball fields and stages throughout the country, far too often these performers were nonetheless not considered good enough to share lodgings, restaurants, or recreational facilities with whites and had to make do with (typically far inferior) separate accommodations. And black customers who paid to see these performers were usually treated in like fashion, relegated to sitting in segregated (and less desirable) sections of the audience — if they were allowed to attend at all. Perhaps nowhere was this disparity symbolized more than in the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, where black entertainers (primarily singers) regularly entertained casino and resort guests in hotel showrooms and lounges, but oftimes weren't allowed to stay in those very same hotels, or eat in their restaurants. Black entertainers weren't even welcomed as casino patrons, as sportswriter Roger Kahn documented when budding baseball superstar Willie Mays of the New York Giants was booted from a Vegas casino floor for the offense of standing while black: In the world of urban legendry, the paramount example of this form of discrimination is an oft-repeated anecdote that a Las Vegas hotel once went to the lengths of completely draining their swimming pool after singer/dancer Dorthy Dandridge (the first African-American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress) dared to dip her toe in it: It's not hard to see why people might believe that tale, especially in the light of such famously documented instances as a Florida motel manager's pouring acid into a whites only swimming pool in order to frighten black anti-segregation protesters into leaving it: But did the Vegas pool-draining incident actually happen? And to Dorothy Dandridge in particular? The first thing we note is that, in true urban legend fashion, this story has also been told about multiple other black entertainers who worked clubs and showrooms on the Vegas strip: We also note that (in similar urban legend fashion) the incidence of specifically citing Dandridge as the protagonist in this tale increased significantly after the scenario was dramatized in the 1999 HBO film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, starring Halle Berry. Finally, we observe that tellings of this legend generally stem from people who say they heard about the event second-hand (rather than witnessing it themselves), and those tellings don't necessarily jibe with reality — as in the case of Harry Belafonte: At this point in our narrative, the best we can say is that the pool-draining tale may or may not be true, and it may or may not have involved someone other than Dorothy Dandridge. So let's turn our attention to why it supposedly happened. What's reflected in many tellings of this tale (including the HBO film about Dandridge referenced above) is the implication that even a small portion of a black person's body touching the water of a whites-only swimming pool was considered to have so thoroughly contaminated that water as to require its complete removal and replacement, lest white swimmers flee in disgust: However, a tactic commonly employed by segregationists who wanted to deny the use of facilities to unwanted, assertive blacks (especially in parts of the U.S. where segregated facilities were not enforced by law) was to suddenly declare some nebulous malfunction had rendered them out of order (a situation which would usually be quickly remedied just as soon as the unwanted guests gave up and departed). This tactic could, at times, extend to the draining of pools to render them temporarily (or in some cases, permanently) unusable: This thought brings another possible scenario to mind. What if a high-profile black entertainer used, attempted to use, or evinced an interest in using a Vegas hotel swimming pool that management preferred remain limited to whites (so as not to drive away white customers who were dead set against sharing such a facility with blacks)? It might be a bit awkward from a publicity standpoint for hotel management to publicly hustle such a celebrity away from the pool (or even to privately inform that person that he or she was not welcome there), but that problem could be temporarily headed off by fabricating a reason for suddenly draining the pool, thereby making it unavailable to everyone (and covering the real reason for its unavailability). When said celebrity finished his or her engagement and left town (or moved on to another hotel), the pool maintenance problem could be quickly remedied. Indeed, this scenario is the one most frequently cited in discussions of this legend — that a hotel pool was deliberately drained not because Dandridge had contaminated its waters, but as a preventive measure to ensure she didn't try to use it: Of course, a hotel's putting their swimming pool out of action (especially in the desert heat of Las Vegas, where such amenities are expected and prized by guests) and inconveniencing all their customers for an indefinite period of time in order to deal with a single-person problem sounds like self-defeating overkill. Which is why, perhaps, at least some Dandridge biographies suggest that a Vegas hotel deterred her from using their pool merely by threatening to drain it: It's not a stretch to assert that Dorothy Dandridge (and/or other black entertainers) were at some time explicitly barred from using swimming pools at Las Vegas strip hotels in the early 1950s, or that they may have been tacitly discouraged from doing so (by means up to and including threats of pool drainage). But given the dearth of first-hand accounts and contemporaneous reporting, we can't definitively say that any particular hotel ever proactively drained their pool to keep her from using it, much less emptied all the water merely because she dipped a toe in it.
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