Running the Numbers
Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4157476 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Douglas J Flowe (0000-0001-9405-4891, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 108 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 645-646 |
| Publication date | 2021-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaab323 |
| OpenAlex | W4226341241 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Matthew Vaz's history of urban gambling builds on the work of Shane White, Mark H. Haller, and LaShawn Harris to offer a pithy overview of the evolution of numbers running. Vaz tracks the industry from its brown paper bag, door-to-door origins in neighborhoods such as Harlem, in the early twentieth century to the “development of modern government lottery gambling” later in the century (p. 3). He entangles the racial politics of the time with the emergence of the modern American state and national sweepstakes that are now common. As Vaz notes, the policing of gambling was the basis of the surveillance of Black communities from the 1940s to the 1960s. Gambling constituted a lucrative underground economy and, like the later war on drugs, was a source of arrests and police violence for African Americans. Vaz argues that “the transformation of gambling policy recast urban gamblers from criminals into customers,” thereby
Advertising · Business · Criminology · Economics · Government (linguistics · Lottery · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · Computer Science · Gambling Behavior and Treatments · Gender Studies · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |