“We Intend to Run It”: Racial Politics, Illegal Gambling, and the Rise of Government Lotteries in the United States, 1960–1985.

An essay is presented concerning gambling policy in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in New York and Illinois, and the relationship between illegal gambling and the growth of centralized state government-administered lotteries. It discusses the impact of access to taxed gambling and the impact of such access upon African Americans, African American politicians such as then-U.S. representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and numbers gambling in major U.S. cities, particularly New York City.