Daddy was a number runner

Blurb

Daddy Was a Number Runner is the first novel by Louise Meriwether. It was published by Prentice Hall, with a foreword by James Baldwin, in 1970, and is now considered a modern classic. It depicts a poor black family in Harlem during the Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old African-American girl who has one brother who wants to be a chemist and another who is a gang member.