Americans have once again come down with a case of lottery fever. Just two months after a record-breaking $2 billion jackpot, the top prize for Mega Millions stood at $1.35 billion for yesterday’s drawing, one of the largest in American history.

Hopeful gamblers from all walks of life buy lottery tickets at least occasionally, especially when there is a chance to become a billionaire. But studies indicate that the players who spend the largest percentage of their income on tickets and who play the most often are disproportionately male, lower-income, less-educated and non-White.

The popularity of lottery tickets among African-Americans is particularly notable. For centuries, lotteries have served as an alternate mechanism for social mobility for Americans from a variety of backgrounds, and are especially important in Black communities. Both as gamblers and as game operators, African-Americans pursued the chance at wealth that White America often denied them in the mainstream economy. The history of Black involvement in lotteries explains the games’ enduring popularity in African-American communities today and shines a light on how the United States became a jackpot nation.

Lotteries have been part of the fabric of American life since before the nation’s founding. They were used in the colonial era to raise money for infrastructure projects and to help fund the American Revolutionary War efforts. Additionally, if someone died and there was not a buyer with enough cash on hand to purchase their estate, their belongings could be distributed through a lottery — games that occasionally included, as prizes, enslaved men and women.

But the games could also offer dramatic social-levelling opportunities for those same enslaved people. For example, in 1799, Denmark Vesey, an enslaved man in South Carolina who was later accused of planning a revolt of enslaved people, won a lottery prize that allowed him to purchase his own freedom.

In the early 19th century, amid a wave of religious fervour, states began outlawing lotteries, driving the games underground. Some of the anti-gambling concern focused on the gambling habits of the poor — including African-Americans — who, like Vesey, had turned to the games hoping to win a new life.

But illegality did not diminish Black interest in lotteries. By the late 19th century, a lottery game known as “Policy” — involving the drawing of multiple lottery balls bearing numbers between 1 and 78 — became popular in Black communities in Chicago and other cities.

The game’s growth set the stage for the real moneymaker: numbers games, which were introduced in the 1920s. Players selected a three or four-digit number, using it to bet in a variety of ways for as little as a few cents. The winning number was generally decided through a public source that was printed in the newspaper if someone knew where to look. For example, the day’s number might be the last three digits of the total bets placed at a racetrack — if $123,456 had been bet, the day’s number would be 456. The use of these types of numbers helped to assure players the games were not rigged and made numbers games accessible to anyone willing to take a chance.

Numbers games were huge institutions in urban Black communities in New York, Newark, Detroit and almost every major and midsize northeastern and Rust Belt city. While Latino and White working-class players participated, the games’ primary clientele were African-Americans eager for the chance to put down as little as a nickel on a chance at a modest windfall. In his memoir, a Detroit entertainer and entrepreneur recalls the story of a numbers-game operator carrying a bag of money to the bank. He was stopped by a passer-by who asked what was in the sack, to which he replied, “I’ve got Black folks’ dreams.”

Numbers games were more than a chance to dream. If they were able to ward off incursions by White organised crime, Black operators could build fortunes from the games — one of their few prospects for achieving wealth — and many made a point of reinvesting their riches in the Black community. The games were also vital sources of employment, particularly for young Black men who otherwise would have been hard-pressed to find well-paying jobs. The games employed upward of 20,000 people in New York City alone in the early 1970s. Yet racism made these jobs risky. Before the onset of the “War on Drugs”, police relied on anti-gambling laws and the ubiquity of numbers games to arbitrarily harass, arrest and extort Black people across urban America.

The emergence of the first state-run lotteries in the mid-1960s initially did little to threaten numbers games. Early lottery games were glorified raffles with drawings every few weeks or months, and players could not choose their own numbers. “The lottery takes too long,” a Black barber in New York complained in 1967. “Who wants to wait three or four weeks to get some action? ... Most people want some action ... every weekday like with numbers.”

Eventually, states caught on to what made numbers so attractive. As they did so, players gradually shifted to the safety of state-run games. This damaged Black communities by putting thousands of numbers runners, primarily young Black men, out of work — especially because their extensive arrest records prevented entry into the legal workforce.

Ultimately, state lotteries not only usurped an important Black community institution, but began extracting money from poor, hopeful bettors in the name of government revenue that was not reinvested in those communities. To this day, daily numbers games are a steady source of income for state lotteries, and the players are still predominantly Black. In 2021, numbers games registered $13.5 billion in total sales, nearly 14 per cent of nationwide lottery sales.

Black gamblers partake in other games, of course, including big-jackpot lotto games such as Mega Millions. Unlike numbers, these games offer massive, life-changing jackpots. For many bettors, they hold similar appeal to what probably attracted Vesey to the lottery in 1799. Lotteries are an inherently democratic means of wealth distribution. They do not discriminate on the basis of race — or class, gender, ability or education. A win may be unlikely, but, as one Harlem bettor explained during a 1985 jackpot frenzy, “The big difference between lotto and life is that in this game, everybody has the same chance.”

This reality appeals to Americans who have lost faith in the traditional economic ladder but have not given up on dreams of striking it rich. Almost every American has a better chance of moving up the class ladder through work or entrepreneurship than they do of defying the 1-in-302 million odds of hitting the Mega Millions. But, especially in communities facing public and private-sector disinvestment and continued police violence, many people may perceive that they have no chance in the mainstream economy. In their minds, the lottery offers at least some chance.

Gamblers cannot be held entirely at fault for this misguided logic. For decades, lottery commissions have engaged in sales tactics, especially advertising, that have preyed on Black communities. In multiple states, the content and placement of lottery advertising has at times targeted Black bettors. A recent investigation also found that stores that sell lottery tickets are concentrated in lower-income neighbourhoods — often Black and Latino areas — in all 45 lottery states.

There is no sinister plot by lottery commissions to extract money from Black communities. Rather, lottery officials are simply fulfilling their mandate to maximise revenue for the state. In the 1970s and 1980s, as states introduced scratch-off tickets, daily numbers and lotto games, officials projected that poor communities of colour would provide a strong market for tickets. These assumptions led to a heavy concentration of advertising and retailers in these neighbourhoods, which led to increased sales, which led to more advertising and retailers, which led to increased sales and so on.

Gambling has been a popular pastime in the United States for centuries. But lotteries’ disproportionate popularity in Black communities is hardly inevitable. The Mega Millions frenzy this week offers a reminder of the conditions that have led many Americans to see a jackpot as their best chance at a new life. The odds are astronomical. But in an economy that still does not treat all people equally, it is no wonder that so many Black Americans see lottery tickets as a chance they are willing to take.

• Jonathan D. Cohen is the author of For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America and the co-editor of Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen