Introduction

Sometime in the late 1920s or even as late as 1930, numbers gambling arrived in Atlanta. Who brought the street lottery to the city or how appear to have been forgotten or erased. It could have been a Pullman porter or a baseball player or a musician or an itinerant laborer who taught Atlantans how to run a numbers racket. Or, it might have been a white gambler taking advantage of fertile new territory. However and whenever numbers made its way to Atlanta, it became an integral part of Black life and the white underworld just like it had in most every other city and town in the United States by 1940. This post shines a little light into a dark corner in Atlanta’s past to reveal the city’s bug men (and women).

In Atlanta, the players and the men and women in the sporting life — the backers, writers, and runners — called the numbers racket “the bug.” It’s a catchy name that stuck and by 1932, when newspapers began reporting on Atlanta police officers arresting numbers runners and writers, that’s what reporters called it.[1]  Within a decade, numbers gambling employed hundreds of Atlantans and was a profitable business that historians won’t find discussed in any of the city’s boosterist literature.

The existing scholarship on metropolitan Atlanta is mostly silent about numbers gambling. There are about a dozen mentions of “the bug” in Franklin Garrett’s three-volume survey, Atlanta and Environs.[2] Later mentions tend to focus on high-profile murders, like white racketeer Eddie Guyol in 1935 and Black numbers banker Wesley Merritt in 1995.[3]

I was turned onto the significance of numbers gambling in Black communities by interviewing a retired Washington, D.C., journalist for my work on gentrification in Decatur. The former Washington Afro-American columnist and editor is widely credited as being the most influential vector for the urban legend, “The Plan.”[4] In our conversations, the journalist recounted her early days in Washington and the world of numbers gambling and after-hours clubs she navigated.

After those interviews, I began looking for numbers in the communities where my research took me: Washington, D.C.; the Maryland suburbs; and, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I also got to thinking about my work in Decatur and all of the interviews I did between 2011 and 2016 to understand gentrification and erasure there. No one had mentioned numbers or “the bug.” And, none of the sociology, history, and geography work that I recalled reading addressed numbers and its culture and history in Atlanta or its suburbs.[5]

Taking a cue from something I learned in my work on erasure, I started asking where were the numbers in Decatur and Atlanta? The remainder of this post offers a primer on numbers and its role in Black communities as well as an overview of numbers history in Atlanta. The final section is a call to metropolitan Atlanta’s history through new gazes and new lenses.

History by The Numbers

Most historians agree that numbers gambling supplanted an earlier street lottery called policy. The earlier game has roots in the mid-nineteenth century and it was played by betting on the outcomes of state lotteries or on daily drawings of numbered balls. Later variants include bolita, a lottery game that originated in Cuba that uses numbered balls drawn from a bag or cage. Numbers appeared first in Harlem in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century as another Caribbean import. Unlike policy and bolita, numbers relied on Wall Street figures published in daily newspapers.[6]

Racketeers used a combination of digits derived from the daily returns to arrive at a three-digit number. The New York Bank Clearing House returns provided numbers racketeers throughout the country with their earliest digits. Published in daily newspapers, bettors and bankers alike eagerly awaited their release. By 1930, under pressure from law enforcement and the financial industry, newspapers began rounding the numbers to make it harder for the racketeers to cull their digits. In later years, racketeers relied on horse racing returns and other sources for their daily numbers.[7]

Numbers rackets are stratified crime syndicates with leaders known as bankers or backers. These bankers, sometimes called “kingpins” by the press and the police, were the entrepreneurs who collected and dispensed money, including bribes to elected officials and the police. Numbers writers were the middle managers who controlled the numbers runners, the men and women who took the bets on street corners, in barbershops, and in the many stores where gambling had higher revenues than candy and cigars.[8]

Numbers rackets cropped up in cities, small towns, suburbs, and farming communities. In Black communities where folks couldn’t get a mortgage or a business loan, the numbers banker played a critical role. They were in a sense one-stop lending and economic development providers. Their roles as outlaws and as benefactors became legendary in places like Harlem (Casper Holstein and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson) and Pittsburgh (Gus Greenlee).[9]

“The numbers runner is one of the most potent cultural symbols in African-American urban life,” wrote historian Victoria Wolcott.[10] By the 1930s, numbers had worked its way into Black popular culture as blues songs, comic strips, and in literature.[11] One Pittsburgh resident eloquently described the role that the numbers played in that city’s iconic Hill District: “We had two people that we had to depend on in those days and that was the ministers and the number writers.”[12]

The Bug

“All black folks know the bug man,” a friend told me recently. “Everyone knows someone who ran numbers. That was our way of life.” My friend was born in Atlanta in the 1950s and her family was one of the first wave of Blacks to move into South Decatur (Oakhurst) in the mid-1960s.[13] My friend’s older brother was a numbers man. Her mother and her grandmother were heavy players. After they died, she found their dream books among their belongings.[14] Her memories underscore the missing narratives about numbers in Atlanta.

According to a comprehensive investigation into organized crime in South Carolina, Atlanta was a gambling hub by 1937 with numbers rackets booking $100,000 a day.[15] Georgia newspapers outside Atlanta began reporting in the early 1930s on numbers arrests. African American runners typically found themselves in custody in Atlanta while in places like Jackson, in Butts County, Blacks were running the rackets.[16]

A law enforcement report published in the 1970s suggested that whites controlled Atlanta’s numbers rackets until the late 1940s, while conceding that “Blacks have historically been the most active numbers players” in the city.[17] Though it’s possible that whites introduced numbers gambling to Atlanta, it’s more likely that Black gambling entrepreneurs have been forgotten or erased.[18] Charlie Cato, one of Atlanta’s top Black numbers bankers in the 1970s, got his start in the 1950s.[19] Wesley Merritt, another, also launched his racketeering career in the 1950s and by 1960, he was running one of Atlanta’s “biggest lottery operations.”[20]

Atlanta’s bug men and women got wealthy off the game and its players. Though the racket daily drained pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters from the city’s working-class residents, it also offered some the chance to pay off debts, enjoy a night out on the town, or even a way out of the ghetto. “I do know of a family that actually hit real big,” my Decatur friend told me. “That got them out of Buttermilk Bottom into the Westside, to a nice home.”[21]

Future Directions

The bug mattered in metropolitan Atlanta history. Yet, opportunities to learn about the numbers in Atlanta and its suburbs are dwindling. Displacement and death are reducing the number of live sources with primary accounts of what it was like to be a player and to be employed in the rackets.

Explorations into the numbers in Atlanta likely would open up new pathways to understanding the rise of the Black Mecca’s middle class. Though I haven’t researched the specific businesses in Atlanta and Decatur, if patterns set in other cities hold true, then numbers money capitalized entertainment venues, stores, restaurants, and professional services like insurance firms, funeral homes, and barbershops. My Decatur friend even suggested that more than a few church coffers might have been sustained by numbers money, all provided by Black numbers bankers:

They were known for laying the foundation, giving money for like a lot of the churches, a lot of the businesses on Auburn Avenue, and a lot of different things that was happening and taking place, everybody knew the number man had already laid the foundation and gave the deacon the money to put down for, you know, this, that, and whatever. Gave the preacher the money for this, that — everybody knew that.[22]

Explorations into the role of numbers gambling in Atlanta has much to offer beyond its social and economic history implications in Black communities. Important questions loom over what role numbers gambling played in Atlanta’s politics and the metropolitan area’s growth machine. There are tantalizing clues in the investigations of police and political corruption in the 1970s, yet key sources on Atlanta’s late twentieth century economic history are silent on the numbers.[23] No history of Black life in Atlanta is complete without a discussion of the bug, numbers gambling because, “That was the way of life.”[24]

 

Notes

[1] Atlanta newspapers began reporting on “lottery” arrests earlier, but the articles lack sufficient details to ascertain whether the arrests were for policy or for numbers. See “Whiskey-Lottery ‘Ring’ Broken Up; 7 Persons Jailed,” Atlanta Constitution, August 19, 1931.

[2] Garrett’s entries focus on the 1960s and 1970s when there were several big arrests and investigations involving police and government corruption. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, 1880s-1930s, vol. III (Atlanta, Georgia: University of Georgia Press and Atlanta Historical Society, 1987), 401, 424, 579.

[3] Maurice J. Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 226; Conor Lee, “Eddie Guyol – The Numbers King of Atlanta,” History Atlanta (blog), October 9, 2013, http://historyatlanta.com/eddie-guyol-the-numbers-king-of-atlanta/ (accessed March 20, 2021).

[4] David S. Rotenstein, “The Decatur Plan: Folklore, Historic Preservation, and the Black Experience in Gentrifying Spaces,” The Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 526 (2019): 431–51.

[5] I emailed several scholars who have researched social history and Black culture in Atlanta since the 1960s and none could point to studies that focus on numbers gambling in the city.

[6] Shane White et al., Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[7] White et al.; Matthew Vaz, Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

[8] Don Liddick, The Mob’s Daily Number: Organized Crime and the Numbers Gambling Industry (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1999); Rufus Schatzberg and Robert J. Kelly, African-American Organized Crime: A Social History, Garland Reference Library of Social Science; Current Issues in Criminal Justice, v. 939. v. 12 (New York: Garland Pub, 1996).

[9] Robert Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh, Illini Books ed, Sport and Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); White et al., Playing the Numbers.

[10] Victoria W. Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” Radical History Review, no. 69 (Fall 1997): 52.

[11] Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson, eds., Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 104–5; Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition, A Da Capo Paperback (New York, N.Y: Da Capo Press, 1989), 128–47; Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 1968th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1940), 101–16.

[12] Wylie Avenue Days, videorecording (WQED Communications, 1991).

[13] Interview, March 19, 2021. I am preserving her anonymity because of the sensitivity (criminal activity) of the subject.

[14] Bettors used dream books to select their numbers. The books were widely published and marketed to African Americans. People would use them to look up something they dreamed — an animal, an event, etc. — and the books would have three-digit numbers corresponding to the dream.

[15] South Carolina, ed., Report of Joint Committee Created under Joint Resolution 662 of 1937 to Investigate Law Enforcement, 1974th ed., Criminal Justice in America (New York: Arno Press, 1937), 248.

[16] “Whiskey-Lottery ‘Ring’ Broken Up; 7 Persons Jailed”; “Lottery ‘Pick-Up’ Shot By Officer,” Atlanta Constitution, July 26, 1933; “‘The Bug’ Racket Worked By Negroes,” Jackson Progress-Argus, March 12, 1937, https://gahistoricnewspapers-files.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053022/1937-03-12/ed-1/seq-2.pdf.

[17] United States, ed., Staff Studies and Surveys, Supporting Materials for the Report of the National Commission for the Review of Federal and State Laws Relating to Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1976), 423.

[18] “Negroes No Longer Control Harlem Numbers Business as Kings Work for Bronx Beer Racketeer,” The New York Age, August 13, 1932; “War on Numbers Racket Kings,” Color, June 1951.

[19] “Cato Arrested,” The Great Speckled Bird, November 21, 1974.

[20] “5 Seized Here in Raid,” Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1960.

[21] Interview, March 19, 2021. Atlanta’s clergy and newspapers repeatedly railed against the evils of numbers gambling from pulpits and editorial pages; see “‘Digits’ Hit By Baptist Preachers,” Atlanta World, February 19, 1932; “Henderson Preaches Strong Sermon on Numbers; Members Support Plea,” Atlanta World, February 26, 1932.

[22] Interview, March 19, 2021.

[23] Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, Comparative American Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, Studies in Government and Public Policy (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1989); Jeff Nesmith and Bob Allison, “Jackson’s Firm Manages Lottery Figure’s Buildings,” Atlanta Constitution, March 27, 1973; “Organized Crime Linked to Police,” The Atlanta Voice, June 29, 1974.

[24] Interview, March 19, 2021.

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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