Running the Numbers

Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling

Matthew Vaz

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226854601, 9780226690445
• eBook ISBN: 9780226690582
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Every day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today's lotteries can be found in an African American gambling economy that flourished in urban communities in the mid-twentieth century. In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy.

As Vaz highlights, early urban gamblers favored low-stakes games built around combinations of winning numbers. When these games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem and Chicago's south side, police took notice of the illegal business—and took advantage of new opportunities to benefit from graft and other corrupt practices. Eventually, governments found an unusual solution to the problems of illicit gambling and abusive police tactics: coopting the market through legal state-run lotteries, which could offer larger jackpots than any underground game. By tracing this process and the tensions and conflicts that propelled it, Vaz brilliantly calls attention to the fact that, much like education and housing in twentieth-century America, the gambling economy has also been a form of disputed terrain upon which racial power has been expressed, resisted, and reworked.
 

1

Politics and the Old Policy Wheel

“I’ll give your people jobs,” Chicago Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson proclaimed to a black audience in 1927. “And if any of you want to shoot craps go ahead and do it. When I’m mayor the police will have something better to do than break up a little friendly crap game.”1 The statement was revelatory. Thompson spoke to a basic political reality: gambling enforcement practices had serious implications in black urban communities. A regime of strict or racially targeted enforcement of gambling laws had the potential to choke the neighborhood economy, undercut political efforts, and ensnare countless working people in police raids and roundups. Bill Thompson was the first mayor of a large American city to rely on black voters as a key element of his electoral coalition. He was not the last. From the 1920s through the 1950s, gambling was a critical articulation point between black electoral politics and citywide political regimes.

For much of the twentieth century, gambling was a foundational element of black working-class life in Chicago. This is not to assert that black Chicagoans gambled more than the white residents of that city or that black city dwellers in general had a special inclination toward gambling. Rather, a paucity of opportunity for economic advancement and a severely constrained field of political and social action left betting as an attractive means of achieving wealth and upward economic mobility. Organized gambling was one of the few sources of funds to spur business growth and to conduct politics. Thus, gambling was more openly visible on the streets of the South Side than in other neighborhoods.

The possibilities held by a winning bet may have preoccupied the thoughts and dreams of working-class urban African Americans more so than among their white counterparts. Furthermore, the deep interconnection between the gambling underworld and the arenas of electoral politics, legitimate business, and the everyday hopes and aspirations of working people left the black communities of cities such as Chicago highly vulnerable to any shifts or fluctuations in gambling enforcement policies set by citywide administrations.

The political fights to sort out gambling arrangements in Chicago during the 1940s and ’50s dragged in an array of actors and institutions. Elected officials, church groups, the police department, the media, and thousands upon thousands of black Chicagoans arrested as common gamblers—all had a stake in the matter. Few emerged from the wrangling unscathed, and none emerged satisfied. All along, the basic inconsistency between the law and popular practice served to undermine the legitimacy of the municipal government and its police, while it drastically limited the possibilities for black political action. While this popular illegality was a hazard at the center of urban life, nonetheless the black community, the police, and the city government all sought to direct gambling to their own ends.

In the struggle to arrange and rearrange gambling, racial power proved paramount. The police conveniently used gambling laws to exercise authority over the black community, effectively criminalizing large segments of the black working class, while also collecting tribute from the gambling economy to supplement their own salaries. Municipal administrations alternately condemned or condoned the policy game at the expense of meaningful black political action and to the advent of a public discourse truly dismissive of black claims for social justice.

Through much of the 1940s in Chicago, black gambling was largely in the hands of black operators from top to bottom. The policy gambling economy, in fact, undergirded an emergent black political machine on the South Side. Yet by the end of the decade, this dynamic was under severe strain. The autonomy of the black gambling-politics nexus was beset on all sides, with a mayoral administration attempting to bolster its reformist credentials through tough enforcement, white organized crime figures using violence to muscle in on the game, and grafting police ignoring older protection deals to claim a greater share of the black betting dollar. The politics of the postwar years in Chicago featured illegal gambling as a locus of both friction and connection between the black population and municipal governance, holding together an unstable arrangement of mis-policed and under-resourced neighborhoods governed by corrupt and dismissive authority.

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The policy game was the most popular and most organized form of gambling in the black neighborhoods of Chicago. The terms “policy” and “numbers” are often used interchangeably, although they in fact refer to two distinct games. The policy game appeared in different forms in northern cities during the nineteenth century, taking a consistent shape during the 1870s as a practice of betting on combinations of three numbers between 1 and 78. If a player’s three numbers appeared among the twelve winning numbers drawn, then this bet, called a “gig,” yielded somewhere between $150 and $300 for a one-dollar bet. A bet on two numbers, known as a “saddle,” paid less, while a bet on four numbers, known as a “horse,” paid more. During the nineteenth century, the winning numbers were drawn in Kentucky; results were transmitted by telegraph to the many cities in the North, where illegal policy shops dotted the landscape. At different points in time, in different cities, policy sellers divorced the game from the Kentucky drawings and generated their own winning numbers through the turning of a drum, called a wheel. A number of black Chicagoans operated their own wheels by the beginning of the twentieth century, and their results earned trust and favor among black bettors.

By contrast, in New York, the policy game was dominated by white gambling figures. The African American New York population bet the game heavily, yet few black New Yorkers could be counted among the game’s entrepreneurs. Thus, when the similar game of “numbers,” with preferable odds and an inherent fairness, appeared in Harlem during the early 1920s, black bettors quickly abandoned the policy game and transferred their gambling allegiance to black entrepreneurs selling the new game. After the game of numbers eclipsed the older policy in New York, the state government neglected to create a new category of criminal gambling. Rather, those arrested for dealing in numbers were actually arrested for violation of laws against policy. While the game of policy faded from the New York streets, the terminology persisted.

The Harlem numbers game was considerably simpler than policy. Numbers relied on neutral published figures to generate winning digits. In contrast, policy outfits spun their own wheels to generate the winning numbers, and thus the game was not immune to occasional fixing or foul play. Each wheel in Chicago also had its own winning numbers for the day, while in New York, one set of winning figures prevailed across the city. The simplicity and fairness of the numbers gave it an inherent advantage over policy, and the numbers easily swept policy aside in many cities.

In Chicago such was not the case. In the Windy City, the older, more complicated game held strong among black bettors. The loyalty of the South Side to the policy game was rooted in the tradition of black enterprise in gambling. As the numbers spread from city to city, policy maintained its position in Chicago because it was intertwined in the political, economic, and social structure of the community. In African American Chicago neighborhoods, policy was a mainstay of working-class leisure, a bulwark of legitimate business, an organizing element of politics, and a vital source of employment.

Historian Elizabeth Schlabach describes jobs in the policy game as a mix of hard work, creativity, and artistry.2 Perhaps it was the creativity of the policy world that captured the attention of so many observers of the South Side. Numerous writers working as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)–funded Illinois Writers Project were fascinated with the ubiquity of policy and its penetration into so many areas of life. Novelists, journalists, musicians, and painters, both black and white, who depicted African American Chicago neighborhoods portrayed policy as central.

The pioneering African American anthropologists St. Claire Drake and Horace Cayton gave the policy game prominent billing in their breakthrough community study Black Metropolis (1945). In assembling and synthesizing the fieldwork of more than one hundred researchers who examined the South Side during the Depression, they declared that policy stations were “almost as numerous as the churches.” Drake and Cayton never characterized the policy game as a religion, but they stated plainly, “It organizes, to some extent, the daily lives of the participants.”3

Bettors in both policy and numbers looked to their dreams to settle on their play. Northern cities were awash in dream interpretation books offering associations between an array of persons, places, or things that might appear in a dream, and specific numbers to be bet. Well-schooled players came to know such associations thoroughly and needed no books to guide them. An informant for Drake and Cayton described veteran policy workers who were so deeply versed in the system of numerological associations that they could construct poems with the slips of winning numbers.4

The stations where people bet and the wheels where the numbers were drawn emerged as vibrant social spaces. In the words of Drake and Cayton, “A wheel is a beehive of activity, day and night. It is run by a corps of well-trained white-collar experts. Usually several hundred persons are present to watch, and sometimes the crowd includes a cooperative policeman or two.” A few locations even featured a lunch counter. The drawings were made from drum-shaped containers holding seventy-eight numbered balls, as the crowd waited with excitement.5 African American artist Walter Ellison painted Old Policy Wheel in 1936, offering a sense of the interior of a policy wheel as a cross between a bank and a social gathering.

The leisure at policy wheels mixed with work. When the winning numbers from a particular wheel were drawn, the results were printed on standardized slips and distributed out in the neighborhood. Many of those present at the drawings were typically among the estimated two thousand walking writers who toured the city taking bets for a commission, sometimes working with multiple wheels. Some wheels featured chairs with writing arms, so the writers could attend to their work as they awaited the results. Thousands of others, many of them women, worked for the gambling outfits at the betting stations and in back office functions. According to Schlabach, a number of African American Chicago women owned their own wheels during the 1940s.6

In deference to the large number of people employed by policy, many ministers and civic leaders on the South Side often avoided criticism of the game. The economic centrality of policy was further enhanced by the widespread investment of policy money in legitimate businesses and the extension of policy money into local philanthropy. With the game largely free of violence, intertwined in the worlds of lawful business and politics, excused from condemnation by many religious leaders, and employing thousands of people, the South Side was well prepared “to accept the policy racket as a community institution.”7

The policy game may have been a community institution, however, black policy and numbers operators maintained fluid allegiances to race and class. While they were living outside the law, they were nonetheless entrepreneurial capitalists. They employed the language of racial struggle. Yet like many black capitalists, at times their interests aligned with similarly situated whites, at the expense of the black community.8 Indeed, many black gamblers collaborated with white gamblers connected to organized crime more than they let on. Black policy and numbers outfits often relied on better-capitalized white gamblers for layoff services, hedging bets if the volume of play became too high on a given number. Such relationships were often long term and mutually beneficial.

Policy operators were not securely situated within the black middle class, as the promotion of gambling betrayed the image of respectability that many black professionals sought to project. Meanwhile, their business practices relied on absorbing the scarce funds of working-class African Americans while offering a product of questionable value in return. Despite such complications, the capital that they brought to bear and the organizational acumen they had to offer allowed policy and numbers figures to hold significant influence over black politics in many cities. And with the understanding that political conditions often accounted for the success or failure of black gambling businesses, black gamblers took politics seriously.

Historian Mark Haller posits that black Chicago developed an independent politics in advance of black communities in other cities, largely because of the structural and economic basis provided by policy.9 The connection between policy and politics dates back to the earliest emergence of independent black gambling. The black tradition of entrepreneurship in Chicago gambling began with the successes of John “Mushmouth” Johnson. During the 1880s, Johnson operated a gambling house at 64 South State Street. In his 1935 study Negro Politicians, Harold Gosnell describes Johnson’s gambling house as “a meeting place for railroad men, waiters, porters, and professional gamblers—Chinese, Negro and White.” Johnson soon expanded into policy, able to discern that there was real money to be made from the small change of poor bettors. His successful business eventually attracted attention and ultimately prompted the passage of the state anti-policy act in 1905.10

Johnson died in 1907, and in his absence Robert T. Motts emerged as the most prominent figure in black city gambling. While Johnson had frequently contributed money to politicians in order to keep the police at bay, Motts took a genuine interest in politics. He organized black voters and paid his gambling workers to register new voters. Beyond seeking protection in return for his political contributions, Motts also negotiated patronage jobs for black men and women in government offices. After the death of Motts, Henry “Teenan” Jones stood as the dominant policy operator, working closely with the rising black political leader Oscar De Priest. The nascent black political leadership in the city was hardly in a position to control police activity, and thus to some degree the involvement of policy figures with the development of black politics can be understood as a genuine effort to enhance the community’s political power.11

During the 1920s, many more black Chicagoans met with success in the policy business, most notably the undertaker Dan Jackson. And with Jackson and other policy figures backing black Republican committeemen and aldermen during the administration of Republican Mayor “Big” Bill Thompson, the policy game on the South Side enjoyed genuine political protection.

However, established arrangements of protection were thrown into disarray and the viability of the South Side gambling economy was put in peril with the election...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Politics and the Old Policy Wheel
• 2  “Are You Going to Let a Negro Name the Next Mayor of Chicago?”: Investigations and Elections
• 3  This Community Is Being Criminalized
• 4  Half of the Rest of Their Lives in Jail
• 5  We Intend to Run It
• Conclusion: Lottery as an American Way of Life
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index