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).

Atlanta Constitution headline, October 21, 1968.

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. Continue reading →