Playing the Numbers Gambling in Harlem

At the time, black Americans couldn't legally invest their own money in white banks. Many saw policy banking as an investment and it was often just as risky as putting money in the stock market back then. The organizers figured out what the winning numbers were based on two figures: total daily clearances among all the member banks and the federal reserve bank credit balance. They would combine the second and third digits from the bank clearings with a third digit from the federal Reserve Bank balance. So per playing the numbers that book, the game worked out as such. On the last Monday before Christmas 1930, the clearings were five hundred eighty nine million dollars and the balance was a hundred and sixteen million dollars