Number Running and Illegal Gambling and Fannie Davis

[xoxodede]

My mom and dad - like many of our parents play the lottery daily -- sometimes multiple times per day. Shout out to my Mom.

"Playing the number" -- is something I grew up seeing them do and try to perfect. I can't lie -- I have seen both my parents win many, many times.

But, one constant in my life was the man who was not only our "number man" --- but a close family friend who I knew all my life.

He was the neighborhood number man when we lived on the highly red-lined "eastside" of the city.

And when we my dad built my parents "dream home" outside the city --- and moved to the predominately Black small collection of culdesac's of GM families who had lucrative small businesses/side hustles. Mr. Number Man, stopped being our "number man" -- and just became our close family friend and new neighbor.

As he is the one who told my dad about the land and his goal of making sure it was Black owned and full of Black families.

Our number man was a legend in our town. Loved, respected, revered and cherish by many in our community.

He came from the South in the 50's to Michigan during the Great Migration --- and got a job at GM - where he eventually met my father - and every Black man who moved his family in our neighborhood.

In 2007, at the age of 76 Mr. Number Man was killed while doing his daily number run by a young male who thought he could easily rob - the then old Mr. Number man. But, he was wrong. Sadly, in the struggle our beloved family friend/Number Man/Neighbor was killed.

One of my favorite memories of him is when he purchased all the kids/teens new bikes one summer if we promised to read a book a week.

I can go on about Mr. Number Man and after his murder how the local media tried to present him and his life in negative light. And how the neighborhood and Black community rallied together and demanded a retraction and apology on his legacy and reputation.

I bring my beloved "Number Man" up -- because since reading The World According to Fannie Davis by Bridgett M. Davis - he comes across my mind quite often - as he did today.

The World According to Fannie Davis is amazing -- and loaded with ADOS history. I encourage all to pick it up.

Anyway, in this thread I am hoping we can discuss the history of "Running Numbers," the Lottery and beloved "Number Men" and "Number Women" in our communities and culture.

 

[xoxodede]

As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights “the outstanding humanity of black America” (James McBride).

In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis’s mother.

Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: “Dying is easy. Living takes guts.”

A daughter’s moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to “make a way out of no way” and provide a prosperous life for her family — and how those sacrifices resonate over time.​

 

[get these nets]

Bolett is what it's called where my family is from.

bolet/ borlett/ borlette

 

[get these nets]

Did white organized crime try to muscle in on Black numbers/policy in Detroit?

There are stories of them doing that or trying to in other cities.

 

[Ol’Otis]

Did white organized crime try to muscle in on Black numbers/policy in Detroit?

I doubt it

@xoxodede great thread

Always wondered about the numbers game
It funded a lot of shyt in Harlem

 

[xoxodede]

Did white organized crime try to muscle in on Black numbers/policy in Detroit?

There are stories of them doing that or trying to in other cities.

I'm not sure. In the book - it sounded pretty all-Black run.

I don't know who and IF my Number Man worked for anyone. I know you could play multiple houses (states) with him.

In the book Fannie Davi's daughter mentioned that the "Number Man/Woman" were the backbone of the NAACP and other Black run organizations. And I believe it was like that everywhere. They funded a lot of local organizations, community events -- and made sure everyone in the neighborhood was straight.

 

[xoxodede]

Bolett is what it's called where my family is from.

bolet/ borlett/ borlette

Can you tell us more? Like do yall "run numbers down," use Dream Books, Number Books, use any elementals of spirituality or as we call it "Hoodoo" to help aid in winning?

 

[xoxodede]

Daddy Was A Number Runner

Most novels about Harlem seldom go beyond what might be called its sociology —the devastating impact of poverty and prejudice upon our black lives. At best, these novels are telling indictments of American society for its continuing oppression of black people. At their least effective, they seem almost exploitative.

By Louise Meriwether. 208 pp. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice‐Hall. $5.95.

The truly talented black writer gives the larger dimension to our experience. Because he sees deeply, he is able to reveal the life behind the statistics—its substance, texture and style; he conveys a sense of a culture, which is uniquely black. His esthetic concern, in other words, is with the totality of black experience, including what the young critic and poet, Larry Neal, has termed “our emotional history.”

One such exceptional black writer is Louise Meriwether. In her perceptive and moving first novel about the social death of one Harlem family, she reaches deeply into the lives of her characters to say something about the way black people relate to each other—the cus toms, traditions and manners that bind us together and sustain our underground life. It is her expression of this tribal or communal quality of black life, its group solidarity and sharing, that lends such strength and humanity to the novel. The life she reveals to us is truly a mixture of what Ralph Ellison once called the marvelous and the terrible.

The central character in “Daddy Was a Number Runner” is 12‐year‐old Francie Coffin, from whose point of view the story is told. She is a remarkable heroine. Tough, resourceful, darting around Harlem with the number slips for her father tucked in her middy‐blouse pocket, she is, at the same time, vulnerable, innocent, a dreamer.

The system that destroys the father also claims his two sons. The eldest descends into the shadowy Harlem underworld of hustlers and pimps; the young er, a bright student, drops out of school, assailed by a sense of futility. Their friends and neighbors suffer similar trage dies. And in the midst of it all, that world, which has brought about this human ruin and dis aster — the white world below 110th Street, which Francie can glimpse from her fire escape— remains uncaring, unmoved.

The novel is not without its structural flaws; it is some what episodic, and there is a hurried, sketchy quality to the later chapters. But these are small faults when set against the author's spare, deliberately understated style and her deft characterization, which lifts her people off the page and makes them live. And the Harlem of the thirties, as seen through Francie's eyes, is reproduced with all the fidelity of a James Vanderzee photograph of the same period. Indeed, the measure of Miss Meriwether's art is that she has been able to capture a community as complex as Harlem and to render in depth such a wide range of characters while remaining faithful to the perceptions of a 12‐years‐old.

But the novel's greatest achievement lies in the strong sense of black life that it conveys; the vitality and force be hind the despair. It celebrates the positive values of the black experience: the tenderness and love that often underlie the abrasive surface of relation ships, as in the case of Francie and her brother, Sterling, and her best friend, Sukie; the hu mor that has long been an important part of the black survival kit, and the heroism of ordinary folk.

It is the exposition of these qualities as well as the book's language, which draws its beat and poetry directly from Harlem speech, that lend such power and authenticity to Louise Meriwether's story. Honestly told and carefully crafted, it is a most important novel.

 

[xoxodede]

Bolett is what it's called where my family is from.

bolet/ borlett/ borlette

Stephanie St. Clair, known as Madame Queen, was one of the only women to run a successful numbers game in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and became both an activist and major black employer. Such figures were often pillars of the community.

Stephanie Saint-Clair (December 24, 1897[1] – December 1969) was an American gambler who ran numerous criminal enterprises in Harlem, New York in the early part of the 20th century. Saint-Clair resisted the interests of the Mafia for several years after Prohibition ended; she continued to be an independent operator and never came under Mafia control. She ran a successful numbers game in Harlem and was an activist for the black community. Her nicknames included: "Queenie", "Madam Queen", "Madam St. Clair", and "Queen of the Policy Rackets".

Stephanie Saint-Clair was born of mixed French and African descent in the West Indies to a single mother, Félicienne, who worked hard to send her daughter to school. According to St. Clair's 1924 Declaration of Intention, she gave Moule Grandterre, French West Indies (present-day Guadeloupe, West Indies) as her place of birth, not Martinique as has usually been cited.[2]

When Stéphanie turned 15, her mother became very ill and she had to leave school. She was employed as a maid by a rich family, where she was repeatedly raped by the son. She managed to save some money and, after the death of her mother, finally left Martinique for France in 1912. Even though she could read and write, a rare quality for a black woman at the time, she could not find decent employment.[citation needed]

She emigrated to the United States via Marseille on The Guiana, arriving in New York on July 31, 1911.[3] She used the long voyage and subsequent quarantine to learn English. In Harlem, she fell in love with a small-time crook, Duke, who soon tried to prostitute her. Enraged, she planted a fork in his eye and promptly left New York on a bus. The following night, the bus was stopped by the Ku Klux Klan. Several black passengers were hanged or burnt alive in front of her, and she was repeatedly raped.[citation needed] Following this incident, she returned to New York, learning that Duke had been shot in a fight between gangs. After four months, she decided to start her own business, selling controlled drugs with the help of her new boyfriend, Ed.[citation needed] Much of this speculation about St. Claire's early life is derived from an biographical novel, Madame St-Clair, Reine de Harlem, by Martinican author Raphaël Confiant (available in English translation as Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem).

After a few months, she had made $30,000 and told Ed she wanted to leave him and start her own business. Ed tried to strangle her and she pushed him away with such force that he cracked his skull against a table and died. For months afterwards, she employed her own men, bribed cops, and on April 12, 1917, invested $10,000 of her own money in a clandestine lottery game in Harlem. As a result of her success running one of the leading numbers games in the city, she became known throughout Manhattan as "Queenie", but Harlem residents referred to her as "Madame Saint-Clair".[4]

 

[get these nets]

[/QUOTE]
Th

Can you tell us more? Like do yall "run numbers down," use Dream Books, Number Books, use any elementals of spirituality or as we call it "Hoodoo" to help aid in winning?

The character played by Cicely Tyson in the film Hoodlum

Madame St. Clair, was from the French Caribbean.

Not sure if the game came to Haiti from the other French speaking islands or from Cuba, but it's a big part of the culture for decades.
In a poor country, the stakes and hopes are much higher for wins. Dreams and interpretation of dreams play a big part in selecting numbers, seers make money helping people pick numbers, and yes.....people invoke deities from Vodou to select numbers.

makeshift numbers books, yes

 

[xoxodede]

The Daily Lottery Was Originally a Harlem Game. Then Albany Wanted In.
The numbers were a sprawling, black-run business for decades.

Front cover of “Old Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book of Numbers.”Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

By Bridgett M. Davis

In the early 1920s, Casper Holstein, a black man from the Danish West Indies who worked as a porter for a Fifth Avenue store, liked to study the “Clearing House” totals published in a year’s worth of newspapers he’d saved. The Clearing House was an operation that managed the exchanges of money among New York City banks on a daily basis. It occurred to Holstein that the numbers printed were different every day.

Until then, lottery games existed, but the winning numbers were often chosen in unreliable ways that could produce rigged results. According to the 2010 book “Playing the Numbers,” Holstein came up with an ingenious solution. Using the Clearing House totals to produce a random combination between 000 and 999, he came up with a daily three-digit winning number for a new kind of lottery game. His invention became known simply as the numbers.

It was an immediate hit and quickly created a sprawling underground economy that moved through Harlem and other black communities in the U.S. For 60 years, the numbers reigned supreme as New York City’s pre-eminent daily lottery game — until 1980, when the state decided it wanted in.

From January 1971, three weekly tip sheets, purchased by players for 30 cents to help them decide on a three-digit number to play.Credit...The New York Times

Fannie Davis, ran a numbers business for 34 years. That business provided us, her children, with a solid middle-class life, including a spacious family home, beautiful clothes and college educations — and, thanks to our inheritance, generational wealth. While the numbers were illegal, and therefore had to be kept a secret, I knew about another girl with a parent who ran numbers: Her name was Francie and she lived in Harlem, and she was real to me, even though she was in fact a character in a book.

Daddy Was A Number Runner,” a fictionalized account of the author’s life in 1930s Harlem, where the numbers helped sustain black folks through the Great Depression, when lucky players could turn a hard-earned nickel into $30. The book, published in 1970, has a foreword by James Baldwin, who wrote, “the metaphor for this growing apprehension of the iron and insurmountable rigors of one’s life are here conveyed by that game known in Harlem as the numbers, the game which contains the possibility of making a ‘hit’ — the American dream in black-face, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing!”

The cover of the 2016 Feminist Press edition of "Daddy Was a Number Runner" by Louise Meriwether.Credit...Courtesy Feminist Press
I recently reread Meriwether’s book — still in print thanks to the Feminist Press at the City University of New York — and her story helped me remember how vital the numbers were to black life. But The New York Times archives enlightened me about the fight of the city’s black elected officials, activists and everyday people to preserve this cultural and economic institution — and how much was lost when New York State usurped the game.

Much of that loss was jobs. In 1971, The Times reported that an estimated “60 percent of the area’s economic life depends on cash flow from the numbers,” which employed an estimated 100,000 workers across the five boroughs. Numbers men also in many ways filled the void left by a formal economy indifferent to black residents’ needs: They bankrolled many small businesses, from bars to restaurants to corner groceries, and also saved many businesses from bankruptcy. These bankers helped get out the vote, buttressed black civil rights groups and contributed to black political candidates’ campaigns.

Stephanie St. Clair, pictured here circa 1938, was known as "Madame Queen" and ran numbers games in pre-War Harlem.Credit...Bettmann/Getty

Numbers money provided a foundation from which stellar careers could be launched in everything from athletics to public service to entertainment. Colin Powell’s father bought their family home with proceeds from hitting the Number. Harry Belafonte’s Uncle Lenny ran a numbers racket and was an early example of success for the singer. The singer Lena Horne’s father, Teddy, was a numbers operator. Stephanie St. Clair, known as Madame Queen, was one of the only women to run a successful numbers game in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and became both an activist and major black employer. Such figures were often pillars of the community.

As early as 1971, when off-track-betting interests were looking to move in on the numbers action, Harlem activist James R. Lawson testified in favor of maintaining local control of the game before a legislative committee. “We intend to run it, come hell or high water,” he said.

Six years later, Lawson proposed, in a radio address directed at Gov. Hugh Carey, that black and Hispanic numbers bankers buy franchises for 4,000 state-licensed numbers operations; the goal was to ensure that African-Americans benefited from a sanctioned lottery rather than fall victim to a “poor tax” burden. Yet Lawson and other black leaders, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel among them, were not ultimately successful.

By 1980, the street-run business in New York was generating an estimated $800 million to $1.5 billion a year. That’s why when lawmakers in Albany proposed a similar, daily pick-three lottery that year, a coalition of city and state officials feared there would be a crackdown on the numbers, and tried to stop the move. If the traditional numbers game could get legalized, the revenue could circulate in the black community and numbers workers could be legitimized and keep their jobs.

To the largely white Assembly — as the City College of New York historian Matthew Vaz has pointed out — the black and Hispanic participants in the numbers game were merely tax evaders and criminals. Also, New York legislators sold the public on the notion that a state-run version of the lottery would funnel a portion of the proceeds to education. This anticipation of lottery revenue, by the way, prompted New York legislators to reallocate education funds to other parts of the state budget.


Still, folks tried to fight back and marched through the streets to Gov. Carey’s New York office. A sign posted in a Harlem Numbers parlor asked, “Does Gov. Carey knows How Many People Are Working In the Numbers Industry. He is Sending Our Families Back to Welfare. We don’t Want Welfare. We Want Our Jobs.”

Nevertheless, the state-run daily lottery began in September 1980, and in subsequent years the numbers game mostly faded away.

From “Old Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book of Numbers”Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

In most of these photos you see the criminal aspects of the numbers, rather than the everyday-ness — the communal, reciprocal and congratulatory qualities. Only one image captures the whimsically designed “tip sheets” used to help players choose a number to play. Another captures Old Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book of Numbers, and Gypsy’s Witch Dream Book of Numbers, two of many simple yet illuminating publications used as bibles for numbers players. These encyclopedic books interpreted dreams by assigning three-digit numbers to different symbols, and nearly any image or experience that could appear in a dream.

Bridgett M. Davis (@bridgettmdavis) is the author of “The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers.”


The Daily Lottery Was Originally a Harlem Game. Then Albany Wanted In.

 

[get these nets]

I doubt it

I'm not sure. In the book - it sounded pretty all-Black run.

I don't know who and IF my Number Man worked for anyone. I know you could play multiple houses (states) with him.

In the book Fannie Davi's daughter mentioned that the "Number Man/Woman" were the backbone of the NAACP and other Black run organizations. And I believe it was like that everywhere. They funded a lot of local organizations, community events -- and made sure everyone in the neighborhood was straight.

There was a real life folk hero out of Chicago, Teddy Roe, who the mob tried to muscle for control of the policy action in Bronzeville. He WASN'T having it, and fought them for years despite being outgunned and them having political ties. Eventually they realized that it wasn't worth it and backed off.

threads on the coli about him

and there was an EXCELLENT podcast / miniseries about the numbers game as part of the economy of Chicago called Bronzeville

 

[get these nets]

@xoxodede

In what era and how did a stigma get attached to "numbers" in your opinion? Both here and overseas it was an integral part of the local economies for decades. People might not have broadcasted that they played it but EVERY segment of the community played or were connected to it somehow. In the Auto Bio of Malcolm X, he mentions how even the elite folks on Beacon Hill, who he hated , played the numbers. In the thread about elite families by ab., he mentions that some of the fortunes of those in that circle was funded by being banks for numbers games.

But for some reason....numbers is spoken about, written about negatively these days, even though the state lotto is just a legal version of it, and considered completely respectable.


Wonder what your thoughts are about when the stigma became attached to it, or whether it was always there?

 

[get these nets]

I want you to check out two books -cause I wanna discuss them with somebody...

Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America - this one was SO good!

Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy - This was great too -- it also talked a lot about Black immigrants and their contributions (good and some bad) to NYC.

I'm quoting and replying here rather than in the Rufus thead where you made the post. Think the convo fits this discussion better.
Thanks for the heads up about books.

I read the Madame St. Clair chapter of book about NYC Underground economy first, and have read most of the rest of the book.

The time and world it covers reminds of my favorite chapters of the AutoBio of Malcolm X. Malcolm relayed to Alex Haley the Caribbean migration to Northeast cities that ran parallel to the first waves of the Great Migration of American Black Southerners, and he talked about Caribbean crime figures operating in Harlem.

I think the author of Sex Workers book did a great job of putting all the elements of the picture together.Very fair way of describing the actions and motivations of individuals of different backgrounds.
Comparing the two public viewpoints as represented by how the two West Indian viewed their stake and future in the U.S. differently was good.
I've never been a fan of "those Black people think/act/move that way", and I think this chapter did a good job of reminding the reader that there are individuals within national identity groups, with different backgrounds,education,training, and views.
==================
The book answered a question that I posed earlier in this thread. Detroit number runners consolidated to fight off the white mobs trying to muscle in on them.

"black policy leaders in Detroit and Chicago who resisted white bankers with the formation of the Associated Numbers Bankers and National Brotherhood of Policy Kings "

 

[GoAggieGo.]

Every Sunday, my girl’s Aunty will tell us to come on over for some supper after she goes to the number man and plays her numbers. This happens every Sunday, lol.

For the super bowl, we was playing squares. $400 a square, me, my girl, her aunty and her mama took part in. Ended up losing $200 that night (I paid for both mine and my girls portion). Scared money don’t make no money, though, and for all the football games, I’ll ask aunty to hit her numbers man up for me to put down some money.