Book Talk | Johnisha Matthews Levi's Number's Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family
- Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- 6:00–8:00 p.m.
- This is a virtual event
Join the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law and Law Alumni of Color Association (LACA) for a powerful in-person conversation on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, with NYU School of Law alumna Johnisha Matthews Levi. Levi will discuss her powerful new memoir, Number’s Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family, which weaves together personal history and public policy to reveal hidden truths about family, justice, and survival in America.
"A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees.
For four decades, Johnisha Matthews Levi believed a conventional story about her birth, picturing her happy parents at the hospital together. While sorting through her late mother's belongings, however, she discovered a document indicating that her father was instead serving time in Lorton Correctional Complex. This revelation, along with rumors about an FBI investigation of her deceased parents' "private business," leads Levi to unearth the hidden history of her family. She ties this story to public policy, demonstrating how state lottery legalization and the War on Drugs disrupted the Black institutions and communities in Washington, DC.
Levi's stirring memoir centers on her brilliant but troubled father, a Black World War II radioman who, facing economic barriers after his naval service, reinvents himself as a "numbers man" for an underground gambling operation. The job enables John Matthews to provide for his loved ones and to achieve a level of success far beyond his childhood dreams in the impoverished Jim Crow South. In the process, he becomes an indirect target of law enforcement.
By examining the circumstances of her father's incarceration, Levi explores how multiple generations of the Matthews family have been haunted by the specter of violence against Black people. Number's Up offers a unique but quintessentially American story of survival through ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward?"
The conversation will be moderated by Felicia Gordon, NYU School of Law '04.