Entry · catalog no. 4306
policy
/ /ˈpɑː.lə.si/ /POL-uh-see
noun · Chicago; urban North · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
The numbers game — an illegal daily lottery in which players bet small change on combinations drawn from a wheel. In Black Chicago it was an institution: policy stations as common as churches, its winnings bankrolling Black businesses, banks, and politics when white capital would not.
“She played the same three numbers on policy every morning for forty years.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Chicago's Bronzeville, from the 1880s and flowering in the 1920s through 40s. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton documented it in "Black Metropolis" (1945): policy organized daily life and moved real money through a community shut out of the legal economy. The Policy Kings — the Jones brothers and others — turned nickels into an empire that funded Black institutions.
1900s
Policy wheels spin across Bronzeville
1945
Documented in Drake & Cayton's Black Metropolis
1970s
Displaced by state-run lotteries
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
Chicago; urban North · 1930s
Spoken by
Black South Side Chicagoans
$POLICYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant141 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1885
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Chicago, IL
@detlex
Detroit, MI
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Citations & Sources
■
St. Clair Drake & Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis
1945
■
+ Cite a sourceNathan Thompson, Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers
2003
See also