Hattie Canty - Infinite Women

Born: 10 June 1933, United States
Died: 12 July 2012
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

In 1990, Hattie Canty was elected the first African American, first woman, and first guest room attendant to be president of the Las Vegas Hotel and Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a role in which she improved conditions for tens of thousands of workers. Canty herself had joined the union as a maid in the 1970s; her husband’s 1975 death left her the single mother of ten children, eight of whom were still at home. “When my husband died and I was a maid, they saw how I could get that family together,” she later recalled. “I had to show strength then and I show even more strength now.”
Born in Alabama in 1933, Canty faced the combined limitations of being a woman and being African American when it came to finding opportunities as a young woman. In the 1950s, she took her two young children to California, where she met her second husband. The family would move to Las Vegas in the 1960s, where Canty worked first as a school janitor and private maid before taking a job at the Maxim Hotel, becoming active with Local 226. “At one point I got so involved in the union,” she said. “I thought, now Hattie, at some point you’ve got to separate the civil rights movement from the labor movement. But you can’t do it. There is no way you can do it. Anytime I fight for anything in this labor movement, it benefits me in the civil rights movement.”
Re-elected in landslides in 1993 and 1996, Canty was jailed at least six times for her union activism, later observing, “Never thought that I would go to jail for anything because I’ve always been a good person. But for the labor movement I’ve gone to jail quite a few times.” Her tenure was marked by successful strikes, including at the New Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall on the Strip, where the union staged one of the country’s longest strikes from 1991 to 1997, costing the owner an estimated $1 billion when she finally sold the property.
One of Canty’s biggest achievements was establishing the Culinary Training Center, later renamed the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, in 1993. Described by Canty as “one true partnership that Culinary have with management in this town,” the program facilitates both entry into the hospitality industry and upskilling so workers can advance in their careers. “Ninety percent of our girls or ladies that go through that Culinary Training Center get jobs,” Canty said.