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First Black man to pass Nevada bar exam helped integrate Las Vegas despite bullets, explosion

Updated February 5, 2025 - 12:06 pm

Charles Kellar was a middle-aged New York attorney with a family, an established law practice and a portfolio of investment properties.

But when Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the NAACP’s legal division, asked him to go to Nevada, he went, according to Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV.

In the early 1960s, “there were no Black lawyers who had passed the bar in Nevada,” said his son, Michael Kellar, who is also an attorney. “No Black lawyers in the state practicing. And there was a significant minority population.”

Kellar, who died in 2002 at age 93, helped to integrate the legal profession and his adopted city.

It wasn’t always an easy or safe effort.

A June 1967 Las Vegas Review-Journal photo shows Kellar calmly reading in an easy chair. In the background, five bullet holes can be seen in the front window of his home. About a month later, the paper reported that the FBI was investigating after an explosion blew a hole through a door at his office.

Michael Kellar said his father stood firm.

“I’m not aware that he was ever concerned about his safety or in any way hesitant to continue in his pursuit of what he believed to be correct,” he said.

Charles Kellar arrived in Nevada with a check for $285,000, the proceeds from the sale of his properties, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a 1999 interview.

When he tried to deposit it, bank employees called the police.

“They assumed a Black man with that much money had to be an escaping felon,” Charles Kellar recalled.

Kellar sat for the bar exam in Reno, where his hotel refused to host him and he had to sleep in the airport, and received such a high score that officials believed he had cheated and delayed his admission, he later said.

Bar examiners also found that he previously had been charged with perjury and “assessing excess rents,” according to a 1965 Review-Journal editorial. He said his company had pleaded guilty to reduced charges and paid a fine, plus rent refunds.

Although Kellar was the first Black man to pass the Nevada bar, he was not the first Black attorney in Nevada because while he was fighting for admission, Earle White, Jr. and Robert Reid were admitted to practice, according to a 2021 issue of Nevada Lawyer.

Kellar was admitted in 1965 after the Nevada Supreme Court overturned the state bar’s recommendation that he be denied a license.

He quickly used his practice to expand opportunities for Black Las Vegans.

“The first case I filed was a lawsuit to provide equal opportunity in the schools,” he said in 1999.

The lawsuit led to the desegration of the Clark County School District, according to Review-Journal archives, although he saw the result — Historic Westside schools fully integrated for sixth grade and students bused out of the neighborhood for other grades — as incomplete.

Frank Schreck, an attorney who worked with Kellar on the suit and once had his house picketed, believes the case’s result eased racial tensions locally.

“I believe that once it was understood that the schools were going to be integrated, that it was like letting some of the air out of the pressure balloon on segregation,” he said.

White said Kellar also helped to design a 1971 consent decree that increased front-facing jobs such as bartender, dealer and waitress for Black people in casinos.

“He would have been the most proud of his contribution to the advancement of the fairness in hiring and potential occupational sources for minorities in the state,” said Michael Kellar.

Kellar remained controversial. In 1972, he was publicly reprimanded by the Nevada Supreme Court after he represented a woman in an eviction case, bought the property where she lived through a company and evicted her. He argued that he’d bought the property on her behalf, according to a decision on the legal website Justia, and the court found that his client had misled him.

He was later suspended from federal practice for a year for filing an appeal in a civil suit without authorization.

Community leaders remember him as someone who paved the way for those who came after him.

Former Las Vegas Councilman Cedric Crear said he grew up near Kellar’s Bonanza Village home. He remembers Kellar, who taught him how to swim, as a community icon.

“He put his life on the line in order for our city to be integrated, for Black people to have fair and equitable opportunities for advancement in our community,” he said.

Rachel Anderson, a professor at UNLV’s Boyd Law School, said Kellar’s arrival in Nevada sparked a legal community and made it possible for Black people to consider being lawyers in Nevada.

“He was the kind of defiant, well-schooled, experienced attorney that Nevada needed at that time,” said White. “(He) demanded and got respect in the courtroom, in the community.”

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.

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