Ruby Duncan Day: ‘I’m grateful that I did it,’ Nevada’s leading welfare activist says

Ruby Duncan wheeled into the school named after her, the school she had witnessed being built.

The 92-year-old Duncan, known as one of Nevada’s leading welfare activists, said she was “happy and surprised” to be recognized in a ceremony Tuesday at Ruby Duncan Elementary School in North Las Vegas. The staff and students, in an effort to honor their school’s namesake, declared the day to be “Ruby Duncan Day.”

“I watched this school being built,” said Duncan, who was joined by friends and family at the ceremony.

Duncan’s fight for welfare led to the creation of Nevada’s Women, Infants and Children program as well as a food stamp program, according to a bio posted on the elementary school’s website. She was also known for storming Caesars Palace in 1971.

In 2008, the Clark County School Board decided to name the school, at 250 West Rome Boulevard, near West Centennial Parkway and North Commerce Street in North Las Vegas, after Duncan. The school opened in 2010.

“The relationship between a school and its namesake is really something special,” said Brenda Larsen-Mitchell, interim superintendent of the Clark County School District. “It not only honors some of the most profound change-makers in our community but also creates a bond where they shape the learning experiences of our students.”

Duncan’s son, David Phillips, said his mother dedicated her life to children’s health, education and the betterment of her community.

“I get so choked up when I see a school named after her and everybody here for her,” Phillips said. “All I can say is, that’s my mama.”

A close connection

The elementary school’s principal, Sarah Payne, took to the podium in front of where Duncan sat. She began telling a story of her own journey in education.

“In 2008, I was doing my student teaching, and I found out that I was pregnant,” Payne said. She had moved across the country, away from her family on the East Coast and she wasn’t making any money as a student teacher.

“I was just terrified, so scared, about how I was going to provide for my unborn child,” Payne told the room. But Payne had been able to access welfare services that she would later learn Duncan’s work had helped create.

“I would not be here, I would not have been able to finish my student teaching, if it wasn’t for you and all the ladies who walked with you,” Payne told Duncan.

Another speaker, Vegas PBS journalist Maria Silva, had also felt the impact of Duncan’s work on her personal life before becoming acquainted with her professionally.

”I am, like so many of you … one of those children,” Silva said.

A child of an immigrant, Silva said she grew up with the welfare services that Duncan helped make available in Nevada.

‘Can’t help but fall in love with her’

Silva carried a black box with her up to the podium that sat in front of her as she spoke.

Having worked on a segment for PBS about the documentary “Storming Caesars Palace” and Duncan’s impact on the welfare system in Southern Nevada, Silva was intimately familiar with Duncan’s work.

“You can’t help but fall in love with her,” Silva said.

Silva’s segment had been entered for an Emmy award: the 2024 Pacific Southwest Emmy Award for Diversity, Equity &Inclusion Program. And it won.

Silva opened the award’s box, revealing the golden statue. “I want to dedicate this to Miss Ruby Duncan, and I’m going to give it to her,” she said.

Each speaker at the podium shared how Duncan graced the Las Vegas Valley.

“What she managed to do is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Shelley Berkley, Duncan’s friend and a former congresswoman who is now running for mayor of Las Vegas.

“As a woman struggling to be able to support her family on very little more than a welfare check, she recognized there were thousands of women in this community that were in the same desperate position that she was in. She united a group of women that said ‘No more,’” said Berkley.

“How is that humanly possible that one welfare mom was able to shut down the entire Las Vegas Strip?”

‘I love that I did it’

Duncan, smiling with the Emmy in hand, said that while growing up in the backwoods of Louisiana, she never thought this would happen.

The daughter of a sharecropper, or a tenant farmer, Duncan moved to Las Vegas as a teenager, Phillips said.

She worked at the Sahara hotel as a short-order cook, but a serious fall that injured her spine, hips, knees and shoulders put her in the hospital, she said.

With severe injuries requiring surgery, Duncan turned to the Nevada Welfare Department. She met other mothers in need of welfare, and they began to organize.

On March 6, 1971, around 1,500 people marched on the Strip. The next day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a “quarter-mile long column of Nevada welfare dissidents marched along the Las Vegas Strip Saturday and stormed the lobby of Caesars Palace.”

“I’m grateful that I did it. I love that I did it,” Duncan said Tuesday.

“Demand it,” she told mothers in need of welfare.

She also shared a message for human beings everywhere: “Vote.”

“We don’t get everything we want. We don’t have everything we need. But at least we are free, and that don’t stop us from learning how to go get it,” Duncan said.