"We Intend to Run It": Racial Politics, Illegal Gambling, and the Rise of Government Lotteries in the United States, 1960-1985

Abstract

In early January 1960, Harlem congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr. opened the new year by tying the conduct of everyday illegal gambling in New York to larger forces of racial discrimination. Speaking to a crowd of several thousand at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street, Powell asserted that corrupt officers in the New York City Police Department were working in conjunction with the East Harlem mafia to drive black numbers bankers out of business. Small-time black operators were constantly being harassed, while big-time white numbers bankers went unmolested. In response to Powell’s claims, Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy declared, “The law is color-blind.”1 The following week Powell continued to press the issue. Once again speaking from the pulpit, he discouraged his parishioners from engaging in gambling yet noted that the true shame was in sending so much money outside the community “to support Italian and Jewish policy bankers.” Police Commissioner Kennedy responded with a rebuke of Powell, arguing that race had no place in the discussion of gambling enforcement. In the words of Kennedy, “The only community the racketeer money supports is the criminal community.”2 New York and many other northern cities had a history of racial conflict over gambling dating back to the 1920s, yet such conflict was centered in the criminal underworld and was thus largely hidden from public view. The dispute between Congressman Powell and Police Commissioner Kennedy marked the beginning of a period of overt political contestation over the status of gambling in urban America. The discourse on gambling that unfolded over the subsequent twenty-five years intersected with demands for racial justice, a growing body of thought on the relationship between the law and personal liberty, elite anxiety regarding public safety and the erosion of order, and a crisis of policing that demanded significant police reform. Such questions of justice, morality, liberty, order,