The Lottery: Stolen Black Ideas and Wealth

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

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

Sooooo basically another one of the #17788755566 ideas whites stole from us was the lottery.

After slavery, African Americans employed a whole shytLOAD of different methods to attain wealth and rebuild their lives. It fukking worked as evidenced by the multitude of economically thriving black towns across America that were burned and destroyed by racist jealous poor whites. (I.e. Red Summer of 1919).

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.

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.

It provided business revenue for many famous black families and businesses.

Sooooooo OF COURSE, whites seized it and made it illegal and stole the idea, and repackaged it in a way it marginalized black communities.

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.

Read more here.
“We Intend to Run It”: Racial Politics, Illegal Gambling, and the Rise of Government Lotteries in the United States, 1960–1985
I fukking hate this place sometimes.

 

[I AM WE ARE]

If you seen hoodlum you'd know this already.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

If you seen hoodlum you'd know this already.

I hadn’t seen that movie in YEARS! Since I was in the 7th grade! I remember it but never knew how wide the net for this shyt was. Billions in revenue.

Steal our ideas. Criminalize them. Repackage. Leave us out.
Rinse and repeat.

 

[humminbird]

Just another point to add in the reputations argument

 

[BrehMan]

It's like I always say: we innovate, they monetize.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

It's like I always say: we innovate, they monetize.

It’s the same pattern. They doing the same with weed. This is why I hate bootstrap rhetoric, because it doesn’t acknowledge active ways they have oppressed us.