When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City

Anthropologist George debuts with a formidable deep dive into the legacy of illegal gambling in Detroit. Beginning her account in the early 20th century, George points to how the era’s Black-controlled numbers game (a popular three-number lottery) was in many ways a net positive for the city’s Black community. It kept money under Black control, while numbers operators like Willie Douglas Mosley, one of the richest Black men in Michigan and founder of Detroit’s first Black weekly newspaper, served as a delicate combination of crime boss and upstanding community leader. Even as “factional strife” led to several unsolved murders in the 1920s and ’30s, wealthy numbers operators were “saving businesses, funding the arts, and providing employment to those in need” while bribing local politicians for Black control over the community’s police forces. The Mafia took over from the 1940s to the 1970s, creating a citywide numbers game that George shows eventually fell apart in the wake of racist “urban renewal” city-planning efforts. During the game’s state-controlled era, which began with legalization in the 1970s, small-scale illicit numbers operations continued to flourish—today there are lotteries operating in the city’s car manufacturing plants. Filled with fascinating detail—champion boxer Joe Louis’s career was initially funded by numbers gambling profits—George’s narrative is accessible and entertaining. Readers will be engrossed. (Mar.)