Detroit, MI
In “When Detroit Played the Numbers,” Felicia B. George looks at illegal gambling's heyday
For Black History Month, Michigan Public’s Morning Edition is featuring conversations with Michigan authors who have written new books about African-American history.
In her book, When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City, Felicia B. George looks at the rise and fall of illegal gambling operations in the city.
The Library of Michigan has selected it for its 2025 Michigan Notable Books list.
George is an anthropologist and teaches at Wayne State University. She spoke with Stateside’s April Baer in 2024.
April Baer: I have to say, before I picked up your book, I was totally unaware of historically how very long lotteries have been with us. Maybe for younger folks who who’ve grown up with the legal lottery systems that exist today, can you explain where lotteries came from?
Felicia B. George: So it’s something that we adopted from England when we came over here in the United States to build the states. It was a fast and easy way to generate revenue without raising taxes. So the United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries. It paid for roads. It paid for churches, hospitals, universities. You name it, and it was used to pay for it. It even helped pay for the American Revolution.
AB: The bulk of the book addresses this period starting in the early 20th century. Could you lay out for us what you consider to be the dawn of lotteries in the numbers in Detroit?
FBG: Eventually, like with everything, fraud kind of creeped its way into the lotteries. And so a lot of the states make them illegal. And so, after the Civil War, they were illegal. You’re not supposed to play the lotteries by the 1890s. They were done. For a while, Detroit had some illegal lottery going on and they declared that it was dead. And so it was dead just — probably for a few years — in the early 1900s.
But in 1920, something really interesting occurred. John Roxborough was a Black man that came from a elite family. He had his own business where he was a bail bondsman, and one day he went to bail out a numbers operator. And this numbers operator said to him, “Hey, you guys don’t have a policy game.” And that was another name for the numbers game. He said, “I can teach you this and you will make a ton of money.” And sure enough, he learned how to run this establishment from this numbers operator. And he promoted it to Detroit and it just blew up from there.
AB: You give us all kinds of evidence throughout the book that the numbers and lottery games were something that, very much like today with legal lotteries, everyone played. Rich people, poor people, all races. Another thing that you bring up pretty early in the book is pushing back and questioning the concept of gaming as predatory in Black communities. And you point out many different examples of how the games kept money in the community.
FBG: It was really important for Black people to have a financial institution. We’re talking about a period of time when redlining was going on, when Blacks were denied employment, when they were denied loans for businesses, where there was not money to be used to go to colleges and universities. And so these numbers men here in Detroit really considered themselves race men. Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community.
“The United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries… It even helped pay for the American Revolution.”
Author Felicia B. George
A lot of these men would donate money to the Urban League, to the NAACP. And they would make sure that these organizations had money so that they could keep running. They provided scholarship funds for students. They gave loans for businesses, nightclubs, restaurants. When the Depression hit, these same men made sure that they were feeding the homeless and the people that didn’t have food. And so they really, really gave back economically and socially to the communities that they served.
AB: Felicia, the book also gives us a lot of detail on the very complicated relationship between “policy,” and “the numbers,” and law enforcement. Thank you also for explaining the policy was how people talked about the games where lottery numbers were selected, I guess in the way that we think about it now. And the numbers were a bit more of something that involved published results from from different kinds of things. I never really understood that distinction before.
Can you explain law enforcement’s relationship with illegal gambling in Detroit?
FBG: In order for the numbers game to be played, they had to have protection, and they had to have a way to ensure that they wouldn’t be raided and lose their money. And so they had a number of people, including the mayor of the city of Detroit, the sheriff for Wayne County, the prosecutor for Wayne County, and a number of police officers for Detroit Police Department were on their payroll.
AB: There’s a whole chapter devoted to a period in which John Roxborough … was indicted. And all of a sudden a lot of things that had been going on below the surface were very much more public. Can you explain what played out at the trial and the impact that it had on the numbers in the city?
FBG: There was a woman who worked for one of the Irish number houses, and she was a divorcee and was having an affair with the manager of one of these numbers houses. And he pretty much gave her a Dear John letter and, told her, “Hey, you know, I’m no good. I’m breaking up with you. You can do better than me.”
And she met with him one final time to give him an opportunity to come back to her, and he wouldn’t. And so she picked up her child and she committed suicide and killed her child. But before she did this, she sent letters all over the city. She sent it to the Detroit News, the Detroit Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan State Police, to the FBI. And in these letters, she said, Hey, there’s a lot of bias that’s going on in the City of Detroit. The police department is a part of it. They’re being paid off. These are the players. This is what’s going on.
When this hit the newspapers, the public was enraged and then a lot of the numbers men were exposed. John Roxborough, who was [famed boxer] Joe Louis’s manager, and a whole bunch of other numbers operators. And so they were indicted and eventually convicted. At that point, you start seeing some of the power that the Black numbers operators had, they really, really started to diminish.
“Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community.”
Author Felicia B. George on how Black numbers men in Detroit supported their communities in the early 20th century.
AB: One of the things that was so poignant about the book was seeing how the story of numbers games and policy were really entwined with the story of America and the larger story of Black Detroit. What was the confluence of how the lottery was changing in the years when Detroit’s neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, were changing as well?
FBG: Before urban renewal, you have these clusters where Blacks were forced to live, and so you have these communities and numbers were a huge part of those communities. They were a way for people to socialize, to bond together, not just the economic part or the entertainment part. And so you would have these numbers writers, they would go door to door. They were the ones that, you know, would kind of pass on whatever news was going on in the community. And so they were important men and women in the community.
And when urban renewal comes, now these communities are being broken up. And so these number writers — who have been a part of the community for years that everybody knows who they are, plays the numbers with them — they’re now gone. The telephone had a part in it. You know, now people are calling in their numbers. And so with urban renewal, you’ve lost the sense of community for a number of reasons. And you can just kind of see how it gradually impacted not just those communities, but the relationships in the game overall.
Editor’s note: Quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity. This transcript and the audio version of the interview near the top of this page are excerpted from a longer conversation that originally appeared on Stateside. You can find that interview here.
Federal regulators say the autonomous vehicle company Waymo must stop its cars from blocking first responders. Waymo has been testing its vehicles in Detroit. The head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the agency found several cases of Waymo driver-less vehicles traveling into emergency scenes, blocking firefighters or failing to stop for flashing lights and flares. Federal regulators say they will meet with autonomous vehicle developers to devise ways to address the problem. A Waymo vehicle will stop, however, if it notices nefarious activity from kids riding in it. A Waymo car in California recently stopped in a parking lot and called police after two teens in its back seat allegedly began drinking alcohol and shooting water beads from a toy gun.
Additional headlines for Friday, July 10, 2026
Bar IX location coming soon?
Detroit’s first women’s sports bar is crowdfunding to open a permanent space. Bar IX hosts pop-up watch parties for women’s sports. The bar has raised 65 percent of if its 125-thousand-dollar goal since the campaign kicked off on June 30. Organizers are giving away merchandise such as stickers, keychains, and t-shirts with donations.
African World Festival
The African World Festival is this weekend at Hart Plaza. The festival celebrates culture and history with music, spoken word, food and a retail marketplace. The festival starts today and runs through Sunday. Visit Charles H Wright museum website at for more info and to buy tickets.
Lake St. Clair Metropark to receive updates
Lake St. Clair Metropark is getting 15 million dollars in improvements. The improvements include reopening the North Marina, expanding accessibility across the park, adding new trail connections and modernizing infrastructure. It’s the biggest investment in the park in decades. Renovations at the marina will fully reopen the marina with 78 boat slips for transient docking and bring accessible floating finger docks back to the North Marina basin. All renovations are expected to be completed by the end of summer 2027.
Detroit Riverfront tour
The Detroit Parks Coalition is hosting a free walking tour about the Detroit Riverfront tomorrow, July 11 from 10 a.m. to 11a.m. The tour will give an overview of the history of the riverfront as a well as more info on the newest Ralph C Wilson Centennial Park. Meet at the Dock, located near the Huron-Clinton Metroparks Water Garden across from the Plaza. Parking is available along Jefferson Ave, Rosa Parks, and in the nearby Bagley Mobility Hub and Assembly garages.
DETROIT (FOX 2) – Some Detroit officials are shining a light on ICE chases calling for change, saying they are too fast, too risky, and a danger to the community and everyone involved.
The backstory:
On Wednesday council members Denzel Anton McCampbell, Gabriela Santiago-Romero and Detroit Police Commissioner Victoria Camille, sent a letter addressing it to the head of the Department of Homeland Security – Markwayne Mullin.
In the letter they are demanding that ICE ends “dangerous pursuits through residential neighborhoods.”
They cited two pursuits — in May and June — where ICE sped through areas where children played, and both ended in injury.
Both individuals who were being pursued, they say, had no criminal activity – so they’re calling for an end to these chases.
McCampbell spoke about the letter and what they hope to accomplish.
“Talk about immigration law, this is not criminal law. So these chases are happening based on civil issues and endangering our community,” he said. “So we wanted to ensure that we sent a letter for accountability to Homeland Security to demand that they stop this and follow their own rules to keep our neighborhoods safe.”
In the letter, McCampbell, Santiago-Romero, and Camille call on DHS to:
- Cease vehicular pursuits
- Publicly release its most current vehicular pursuit policy
- Confirm key details regarding the May and June incidents
- Share findings from the resulting investigations
- Hold accountable any agents who break the rules.
They say that the majority of individuals targeted in the Detroit operations do not have criminal records, and that no civil immigration objective justifies high-speed chases that endanger the people being pursued, the agents involved, and innocent bystanders, homeowners, and children.
The other side:
FOX 2 reached out to the Detroit Department of Homeland Security Office requesting an interview and we are waiting to hear back.
Read the full letter below:
Dear Secretary Mullin:
We write on behalf of the residents of Detroit’s Districts 6 and 7 to demand that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) immediately stop conducting high-speed vehicular pursuits through our neighborhoods, and that the Department of Homeland Security enforce its own pursuit standards with the seriousness that human life demands. In the span of three weeks, two such pursuits in Detroit have left two people critically injured, damaged residents’ homes and property, and placed children and bystanders in mortal danger. These are not unfounded notions; they happened on our streets in front of families.
On May 19, 2026, a vehicular pursuit and crash involving ICE left Yerlys Moreno López, a Detroit asylum seeker, with a broken knee and other injuries requiring emergency surgery. On June 5, 2026, ICE confirmed its officers pursued a driver on Detroit’s west side near Whitlock Avenue and Warwick Street. The driver, Mohamd Salim Abdessamed, lost control, crashed through a residential fence and garage, was impaled by a fence post, and landed atop two parked vehicles. He was hospitalized in critical condition. The homeowner reported that her garage was knocked off its foundation, and a vehicle on her property was destroyed. According to neighbors who witnessed the event, agents operated unmarked vehicles, with only one having its emergency lights activated. At this time, it is unclear if sirens were activated.
That last detail is not a minor one. Federal regulation at 8 C.F.R. § 287.8(e) defines a lawful immigration pursuit as one carried out in a “designated pursuit vehicle.” A pursuit conducted in an unmarked vehicle without activated lights and sirens does not appear to satisfy the Department’s own regulatory definition. ICE’s own 2012 Emergency Driving Handbook further directs agents to “consider and evaluate critical safety issues posed by emergency driving, including the potential risk of death or serious physical injury to themselves, the general public, and the suspect, and should engage in emergency driving only when they determine that the seriousness of the emergency or the severity of the suspected criminal offense outweighs the risk of death or serious physical injury associated with such driving.” We have seen little evidence that such a weighing occurred in either of the Detroit incidents.
The U.S. Department of Justice discourages the use of unmarked vehicles in pursuits, precisely because of the catastrophic risk to uninvolved bystanders. Most American police departments, including Detroit, prohibit chases for non-violent offenses and permit them only to prevent an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm. It is indefensible that federal agents operating on the same residential streets should hold themselves to a lower standard of public safety than the local police who patrol those blocks every day. The overwhelming majority of individuals targeted in these Detroit operations have no criminal record. No civil immigration objective justifies driving a vehicle at high speed past a park where children are playing.
Accordingly, we demand that the Department take the following actions:
1. Immediately direct ICE and HSI personnel operating in Detroit and across the nation to cease vehicular pursuits in residential and populated areas except where there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to a person, consistent with best practices.
2. Confirm in writing whether the agents involved in the May 19 and June 5, 2026, Detroit pursuits complied with 8 C.F.R. § 287.8(e), including the requirement that pursuits be conducted in designated vehicles with activated emergency lights and sirens, and whether unmarked vehicles were used in either pursuit.
3. Publicly release the current ICE and HSI vehicular pursuit policy, as the most recent publicly available guidance dates to 2012.
4. Provide the complete findings of the Department’s investigations into both Detroit incidents, including any after-action review, supervisory authorization records, and any disciplinary or corrective measures taken.
5. Commit to a binding pursuit and use-of-force standard that requires supervisory authorization, prohibits pursuits for non-violent civil immigration matters, and holds agents accountable when they violate it.
Detroit is a community that looks out for its neighbors, and we will not accept a regime in which federal agents treat our streets as a place where bystanders, homeowners, and children are acceptable collateral. The next pursuit may not end with injuries but with a funeral. I urge you to act before it does, and I request a written response within fourteen (14) days of receipt of this letter.
Respectfully,
Denzel Anton McCampbell
Council Member, District 7
Detroit City Council Gabriela Santiago-Romero
Council Member, District 6
Detroit City Council
Victoria Camille
Police Commissioner, District 7
Detroit Board of Police Commissioners
Cc:
The Honorable Rashida Tlaib, U.S. House of Representatives (MI-12)
The Honorable Shri Thanedar, U.S. House of Representatives (MI-13)
The Honorable Gary Peters, United States Senate (MI)
The Honorable Elissa Slotkin, United States Senate (MI)
Watch FOX 2 Detroit Live:
The Source: Information for this report is from an interview with Denzel Anton McCampbell and the letter sent to DHS.
Every seat in the Michigan Senate is up for election this year, and eight of those districts are in Wayne County.
In the 4th, 5th and 8th Districts, only one Republican and one Democrat filed for election, meaning those candidates will automatically be nominated and move on to the November ballot. Here are The Detroit News endorsements in the five contested Senate primaries in Wayne County:
1st District (Southwest Detroit and parts of Downriver, including Taylor, Melvindale and Lincoln Park): Two Detroit Democrats are competing for this seat: Abraham Aiyash and Justin Onwenu.
Aiyash is a former state representative who is hoping to return to the Legislature after a two-year absence. He is a progressive whose policy positions align with Democratic socialists.
Onwenu is an attorney who served the Mike Duggan administration as Detroit’s first Director of Entrepreneurship and Economic Opportunity, helping small businesses get a start in the city. Before attending Columbia Law School, where he was president of the student body from 2023 to 2024, Onwenu worked to combat air and water pollution in Detroit, Ecorse and River Rouge.
In the Senate, he promises to be a supporter of legislation to strengthen neighborhoods by lowering property taxes and investing in infrastructure.
He also supports stronger transparency and ethics rules for lawmakers. Justin Onwenu gets our endorsement in the 1st District Democratic primary.
Patrick O’Connell of Ecorse is unopposed in the Republican primary.
2nd District (Northwest Detroit, Dearborn Heights and part of Dearborn): The district is currently represented by Sylvia Santana, who made an unsuccessful bid to be nominated for the Michigan State University board.
The Democratic primary features two Dearborn residents who are hoping to replace Santana: Erin Byrnes and Abbas Alawieh.
Alawieh describes himself as a political strategist, community organizer and pro-peace advocate. He is supported by the Michigan Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus and aligns with many of its anti-growth positions.
Byrnes is currently a state representative in her second term. Like her opponent, she is well to the left of center on the political spectrum. In the Legislature, she has pushed for utility rate controls.
The two Democrats are similarly positioned. Our choice in the 2nd District is Erin Byrnes, based on her legislative experience.
Harry Sawicki of Dearborn Heights is unopposed in the Republican primary.
3rd District (Detroit, Warren and Madison Heights): The contest to replace incumbent Stephanie Chang has drawn a long list of candidates. The 3rd District starts near Downtown Detroit and stretches north through the center of the city into southern Oakland and Macomb counties.
Eleven Democrats, all from Detroit, are competing in the primary. They are: Mohammad Alam, a Bangladeshi immigrant and Army veteran; LeJuan Council, a property manager and small business owner; John Conyers III, son of the late congressman; LaTanya Garrett, a former state representative; Korey Hall, a former director of community affairs in the Whitmer administration; Adam Hollier, a former state senator; Gary Hunter, a former candidate for Detroit City Council; Kimberly Hill-Knott, former head of the Detroit Climate Action Collaborative; Toinu Reeves, an economist, Abraham Shaw, who owns an auto repair shop, and Eboni Taylor, a community advocate.
There are several interesting and impressive candidates in this race, including Conyers, who just wrote about his father. Garrett has legislative experience, as does Hollier, whom we’ve endorsed in his previous runs for public office.
But we are most impressed with Reeves, a newcomer to politics who brings top-notch credentials to the race. Reeves grew up on Detroit’s east side and is an economist who attended Wayne State University and Dartmouth College.
He serves as chair of the Economic Development Workgroup for Detroit’s District 4 Community Advisory Committee and on the Jefferson-Chalmers Community District Council. He is a former school teacher and autoworker.
Toinu Reeves offers fresh ideas and much-needed skills, and gets our endorsement in the 3rd District Democratic Primary.
Mark Ashley Price is unopposed in the Republican primary.
6th District (Redford Township, Farmington and Farmington Hills): Incumbent Mary Cavanaugh is defending her seat from a challenge from fellow Democrat Stephen Jensen, who shows no signs of a campaign. Both are from Redford.
Mary Cavanaugh, granddaughter of the late Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, has served her district well and should be renominated for a second term.
Joi Pokerwinski of Redford Township is unopposed in the Republican Party.
12th District (Parts of Wayne, Macomb and St. Clair counties, including Algonac, the Grosse Pointes, St. Clair Shores, Harper Woods, Mount Clemens and New Baltimore): Incumbent Sen. Kevin Hertel of St. Clair Shores is unopposed in the Democratic primary. Five Republicans are competing in their primary to face him in November.
They are: Joseph Backus of St. Clair Shores, a prolific community volunteer who has run unsuccessfully for other offices; Patrick Biange of St. Clair Shores; John Goldwater of New Baltimore, an oil and gas entrepreneur; Eileen Tesch, the former mayor of Algonac who faced recall efforts, and Shelley Wright, a former general contractor and owner of a process serving company who says Donald Trump inspired her to politics.
John Goldwater has experience growing a business and creating jobs. He would also prioritize improving skilled trades training. The father of six is a conservative who describes himself as pro-life and a defender of the Second Amendment.
Our endorsement in the 12th District Republican primary goes to John Goldwater.
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