“From Washington Boulevard to Easy Street”: State Lotteries and Black Social Mobility in the 1980s

Throughout the twentieth century, gambling represented an important mechanism of social mobility in urban, African-American communities. Illegal numbers games were ubiquitous in Harlem and Chicago until the 1980s, when gamblers pursued the better odds and larger prizes offered by state-run lottery games. Yet, scholarship on gambling in the United States addresses the spread of gambling without regard for racial demographics of the gamblers. This paper explores the gambling practices among black lottery players in Chicago in the 1980s, contending that gambling represents a crucial feature in the perpetuation of racial inequality in the United States. While deindustrialization reduced rates of social mobility for all working-class Americans, discrimination in housing, employment, and education made the effects of these economic changes particularly pernicious for many black Chicagoans who were left with few choices for advancement other than the impossible odds of the Illinois Lottery. Black gamblers’ view of the lottery as a means of advancements were facilitated by lottery commissions whose advertising has systematically targeted poor black communities with images of wealth, including a billboard in Chicago’s West Side that claimed “This Could Be Your Ticket Out.” Black communities have exhibited a range of responses to these advertisements, from eagerly purchasing tickets to a lottery boycott organized by Chicago’s black religious leaders in 1986. An investigation of the intersection of race and gambling reveals that criticism of lotteries as a “stupid tax” represents a form of victim blaming. Players turned to lotteries due to perceived lack of opportunity through the traditional economy, not due to a lack of awareness regarding the long odds of hitting the jackpot. This investigation of black lottery players reveals that scholars must consider race as a crucial factor in considerations of gambling, and in turn must consider gambling in their assessments of racial and economic inequality.