Ruby Duncan, a mother of seven who turned a back injury into a life of activism and built one of Nevada’s most enduring antipoverty organizations, died April 26 in Las Vegas at age 93, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing her family.
Born Ruby Lee Phillips on June 7, 1932, near Tallulah, Louisiana, Duncan grew up as the daughter of sharecroppers. Three of her four siblings died young, and her mother died before Duncan turned 4. After being raped at age 17 and having a child, Duncan left the plantation and moved to Las Vegas in 1952, joining relatives in the city’s segregated Westside — a shantytown without paved streets or indoor plumbing.
In 1966, while working as a short-order cook at the Sahara hotel, Duncan slipped on spilled grease, severely injuring her shoulder, hip and back. Unable to stand for long periods, she went to the welfare office seeking job training but was instead placed on aid. Nevada’s benefits were among the nation’s lowest: $120 per month, half of which went to rent. Duncan told the Nevada State Journal, “I hate welfare. It makes me sick. I want to vomit. If they want to help me, then help me get off welfare by paying a decent wage.”
Through a sewing class arranged by the welfare department, Duncan met other mothers in similar straits. In 1969 she joined the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization and was elected president.
At the time, Nevada’s welfare director, George Miller, was pursuing an aggressive national model. He sent armed agents to conduct nighttime raids on welfare mothers’ homes, searching for evidence of a “substitute father” to justify cutting aid. Just before Christmas 1970, Miller cut the state’s welfare rolls by roughly 75%, terminating aid to some 3,500 families without mandated hearings.
With the help of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Duncan organized a response. On March 6, 1971, a few thousand protesters — mostly welfare mothers and children, flanked by students, clergy and celebrities including Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland — marched down the Las Vegas Strip. They carried placards reading “Don’t Gamble with Human Lives.” Counterprotesters, mostly white, carried signs reading “Do something Honest for a change.”
When the march reached Caesars Palace, Duncan led the crowd through the doors. “I wasn’t afraid of nothing,” she recalled later. “I had seven children and they got to be fed.” Inside, protesters ringed the casino floor, forcing pit bosses to secure chips and dice and shopkeepers to hide furs. Gambling halted for half an hour as the crowd sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Days later, a federal judge ruled that Miller had “run roughshod over the constitutional rights of eligible and ineligible recipients alike” and restored the cuts. A federal investigation found that the actual percentage receiving aid illegitimately in Nevada was 3.8%.
Duncan continued organizing. In early 1972, to protest Nevada’s refusal to participate in the federal food-stamp program, she led busloads of poor children and mothers into restaurants and casinos for “eat-ins.” At the first one at the Sands, she told the waiters the children wanted steak and lobster, not hamburgers. When 139 bills totaling $636 arrived, Duncan told the manager to charge it to the governor. She was arrested.
Duncan received threats. Her daughter Sondra Phillips-Gilbert told the Journal that the family fielded threatening calls every day. One man later confessed he had been hired to burn down their house but could not go through with it because he knew she was helping families like his.
In September 1972, Duncan and other welfare mothers opened Operation Life in the defunct Cove hotel and casino on the Westside. The organization provided free child care, meals, job training, drug-prevention programs, a newspaper, a swimming pool, the neighborhood’s first public library, and a medical clinic that saw 2,000 children a month. Until then, children in the area generally saw doctors only in dire emergencies; rickets, anemia and other consequences of malnutrition were widespread.
The organization was run almost entirely by poor Black women, many on public assistance themselves, and largely on federal grants that Duncan secured on trips to Washington. In a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, oral-history interview, she described walking into the Department of Housing and Urban Development and finding a room full of female bureaucrats. “I said, ‘Oh, I can outtalk women any time,’” she recalled. She soon secured $250,000, enabling Operation Life to start building affordable housing.
Duncan also became a self-taught lobbyist at the state capitol, staging “commodities luncheons” where she served lawmakers government cheese and canned meat. She pressed the legislature to implement the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and the larger food-stamp system.
She served as a delegate at the Democratic National Conventions in 1972 and 1976 and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to his National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity.
Federal funding for minority-led community groups pulled back during the 1980s, and Operation Life shed programs and closed in 1992. Duncan remained a power broker in Las Vegas Democratic politics, getting out the vote for local leaders. In 2008 she received the Margaret Chase Smith American Democracy Award, whose past winners include Rosa Parks and Rudy Giuliani. A Las Vegas elementary school bears her name.
“She changed the lives of thousands of people who call Las Vegas, and all of Nevada, home,” said Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley, who first met Duncan as a teenager. Berkley recalled visiting Duncan last year during election season. “She asked if I could get a registrar of voters to come to her assisted-living facility and register the people living there,” Berkley said. “And we did…. So up until her 90s, Ruby was still an activist.”
Duncan’s six surviving children confirmed her death. Her daughter Mary Phillips-Gilbert told the Journal that her mother’s proudest accomplishment was “making sure I got all my children through high school and college.” Duncan received several honorary degrees.