Entry · catalog no. 3607
numbers runner
/ /ˈnʌm.bɚz ˌrʌn.ɚ/ /NUHM-berz RUHN-er
noun · Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The street-level agent of the policy or numbers game, who took bets from players door to door or on a fixed corner and carried the slips and the cash back to the bank.
“The runner came by the shop before ten every morning and everybody on the block had their dime ready.”
2.
By extension, an entry-level job in an underground economy that functioned as real employment when the legitimate kind was closed off.
“He couldn't get hired anywhere downtown, so he ran numbers for the man on 118th.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem in the 1920s, built on the older bones of policy — a lottery drawn from a numbered wheel, in American papers from 1830 and identified with Black players by the 1880s. The Harlem game keyed its winning figures to published financial and racetrack numbers, and it was Black-owned before it was anything else: Casper Holstein and Stephanie St. Clair in Harlem, John W. Roxborough and Everett I. Watson in Detroit, the Jones brothers in Chicago. The runner is the bottom rung of that structure and the most visible one, and in Ralph Ellison's phrase the man was a bringer of manna. The takeover by Dutch Schultz's organization from 1931 is the part usually left out: this was Black capital before it was mob capital, and the state lotteries that finished it off were built on the same game.
1920s
The numbers game takes hold in Harlem on the older policy structure, Black-owned and Black-banked
1931
Dutch Schultz's organization moves on the Harlem banks and the ownership turns over
1970
Louise Meriwether publishes Daddy Was a Number Runner with a foreword by James Baldwin
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Harlem, Bronzeville, and Black Bottom Detroit — players, bankers, writers, and the runners themselves
$NUMBERThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical29 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1941
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
1970
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
New York Age, 10 May 1941, p. 9
newspaper
■
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, Harcourt, Brace, 1945
book
■
Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, Prentice Hall, 1970
book
■
+ Cite a sourceShane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars, Harvard University Press, 2010
book
See also