For Black History Month, Michigan Public's Morning Edition is featuring conversations with Michigan authors who have written new books about African-American history.
In her book, When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling's History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City, Felicia B. George looks at the rise and fall of illegal gambling operations in the city.
The Library of Michigan has selected it for its 2025 Michigan Notable Books list.
George is an anthropologist and teaches at Wayne State University. She spoke with Stateside's April Baer in 2024.
April Baer: I have to say, before I picked up your book, I was totally unaware of historically how very long lotteries have been with us. Maybe for younger folks who who've grown up with the legal lottery systems that exist today, can you explain where lotteries came from?
Felicia B. George: So it's something that we adopted from England when we came over here in the United States to build the states. It was a fast and easy way to generate revenue without raising taxes. So the United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries. It paid for roads. It paid for churches, hospitals, universities. You name it, and it was used to pay for it. It even helped pay for the American Revolution.
AB: The bulk of the book addresses this period starting in the early 20th century. Could you lay out for us what you consider to be the dawn of lotteries in the numbers in Detroit?
FBG: Eventually, like with everything, fraud kind of creeped its way into the lotteries. And so a lot of the states make them illegal. And so, after the Civil War, they were illegal. You're not supposed to play the lotteries by the 1890s. They were done. For a while, Detroit had some illegal lottery going on and they declared that it was dead. And so it was dead just — probably for a few years — in the early 1900s.
But in 1920, something really interesting occurred. John Roxborough was a Black man that came from a elite family. He had his own business where he was a bail bondsman, and one day he went to bail out a numbers operator. And this numbers operator said to him, "Hey, you guys don't have a policy game." And that was another name for the numbers game. He said, "I can teach you this and you will make a ton of money." And sure enough, he learned how to run this establishment from this numbers operator. And he promoted it to Detroit and it just blew up from there.
AB: You give us all kinds of evidence throughout the book that the numbers and lottery games were something that, very much like today with legal lotteries, everyone played. Rich people, poor people, all races. Another thing that you bring up pretty early in the book is pushing back and questioning the concept of gaming as predatory in Black communities. And you point out many different examples of how the games kept money in the community.
FBG: It was really important for Black people to have a financial institution. We're talking about a period of time when redlining was going on, when Blacks were denied employment, when they were denied loans for businesses, where there was not money to be used to go to colleges and universities. And so these numbers men here in Detroit really considered themselves race men. Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community.
"The United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries... It even helped pay for the American Revolution."Author Felicia B. George
A lot of these men would donate money to the Urban League, to the NAACP. And they would make sure that these organizations had money so that they could keep running. They provided scholarship funds for students. They gave loans for businesses, nightclubs, restaurants. When the Depression hit, these same men made sure that they were feeding the homeless and the people that didn't have food. And so they really, really gave back economically and socially to the communities that they served.
AB: Felicia, the book also gives us a lot of detail on the very complicated relationship between "policy," and "the numbers," and law enforcement. Thank you also for explaining the policy was how people talked about the games where lottery numbers were selected, I guess in the way that we think about it now. And the numbers were a bit more of something that involved published results from from different kinds of things. I never really understood that distinction before.
Can you explain law enforcement's relationship with illegal gambling in Detroit?
FBG: In order for the numbers game to be played, they had to have protection, and they had to have a way to ensure that they wouldn't be raided and lose their money. And so they had a number of people, including the mayor of the city of Detroit, the sheriff for Wayne County, the prosecutor for Wayne County, and a number of police officers for Detroit Police Department were on their payroll.
AB: There's a whole chapter devoted to a period in which John Roxborough ... was indicted. And all of a sudden a lot of things that had been going on below the surface were very much more public. Can you explain what played out at the trial and the impact that it had on the numbers in the city?
FBG: There was a woman who worked for one of the Irish number houses, and she was a divorcee and was having an affair with the manager of one of these numbers houses. And he pretty much gave her a Dear John letter and, told her, "Hey, you know, I'm no good. I'm breaking up with you. You can do better than me."
And she met with him one final time to give him an opportunity to come back to her, and he wouldn't. And so she picked up her child and she committed suicide and killed her child. But before she did this, she sent letters all over the city. She sent it to the Detroit News, the Detroit Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan State Police, to the FBI. And in these letters, she said, Hey, there's a lot of bias that's going on in the City of Detroit. The police department is a part of it. They're being paid off. These are the players. This is what's going on.
When this hit the newspapers, the public was enraged and then a lot of the numbers men were exposed. John Roxborough, who was [famed boxer] Joe Louis's manager, and a whole bunch of other numbers operators. And so they were indicted and eventually convicted. At that point, you start seeing some of the power that the Black numbers operators had, they really, really started to diminish.
"Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community."Author Felicia B. George on how Black numbers men in Detroit supported their communities in the early 20th century.
AB: One of the things that was so poignant about the book was seeing how the story of numbers games and policy were really entwined with the story of America and the larger story of Black Detroit. What was the confluence of how the lottery was changing in the years when Detroit's neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, were changing as well?
FBG: Before urban renewal, you have these clusters where Blacks were forced to live, and so you have these communities and numbers were a huge part of those communities. They were a way for people to socialize, to bond together, not just the economic part or the entertainment part. And so you would have these numbers writers, they would go door to door. They were the ones that, you know, would kind of pass on whatever news was going on in the community. And so they were important men and women in the community.
And when urban renewal comes, now these communities are being broken up. And so these number writers — who have been a part of the community for years that everybody knows who they are, plays the numbers with them — they're now gone. The telephone had a part in it. You know, now people are calling in their numbers. And so with urban renewal, you've lost the sense of community for a number of reasons. And you can just kind of see how it gradually impacted not just those communities, but the relationships in the game overall.
Editor's note: Quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity. This transcript and the audio version of the interview near the top of this page are excerpted from a longer conversation that originally appeared on Stateside. You can find that interview here.
