The Ledger
One in seven listings here has been taken back off.
2,710 businesses have been added to this directory. 381 of them were removed again — 14.1% of everything it has ever held. 2,329 stand today. Every other directory shows you what it kept.
How ownership is checked
Where these numbers come from. Not from a summary anybody wrote. Every commit that has ever changed the directory file was re-read and the listings in it counted, so the figures below are the file as it actually stood on each of those days. The sentence beside each pass is what was written at the time.
What came off, and why
14 passesRemove 123 businesses that were never realAugust 20, 2026−123
Ninety-six listings that were never real businessesSeptember 1, 2026−96
The same generator in the other forty-one statesSeptember 8, 2026−49
New York: half the listings were wrong, and looking is the only way to find thatAugust 29, 2026−31
Twenty-seven listings whose own sites name owners who are not BlackSeptember 4, 2026−27
Twenty-six more with owners in the public record, and the ones reading savedSeptember 8, 2026−26
The last 62, read one at a time — and the address field gave up a generatorSeptember 8, 2026−16
Texas: 116 listings had no way to reach them, now 22August 30, 2026−3
The clusters were real; the wider "fifth wave" was me over-calling itAugust 29, 2026−2
The 44 unreachable New York listings: 36 now have a way to reach themAugust 29, 2026−2
The blocks — and the two duplicates it immediately foundAugust 31, 2026−2
The same two restaurants were in the directory twiceSeptember 1, 2026−2
The Library now sends readers to the 30 Black-owned bookshops in the directoryAugust 31, 2026−1
One listing that was two, and two phone numbers nobody can ringSeptember 5, 2026−1
The names are not published, on purpose. “This business was removed because its owner is not Black” is a public statement about a real, named company, made on the strength of one afternoon’s reading. The count is a fact about how this directory is kept. The name would be an accusation about somebody’s livelihood, and those are not the same thing. What is published is the number, the date, and the reason.
And what was checked and kept
A record of removals alone would flatter the directory — it would look like every hard look ended in a deletion. Most did not. These are the checks that ran and the listings that survived them.
Read one at a time, and clearedListings a person read against public sources and found no reason to remove. Recorded with what cleared them, so the next person does not repeat the work.55
Ownership checked against named sourcesA named owner and the public sources that name them. Not a certification — the working, shown.153Citations behind those checks, re-openedEvery source link requested on September 9, 2026. 198 answered, 29 refused an automated request rather than a person, and 7 are gone and struck through where they appear.234
Websites requested, and readOn September 8, 2026, every listed website was fetched and what it served was read — because a domain can lapse and be registered by somebody else. 200 no longer resolve, 72 sit with a broker, and 6 now serve gambling sites. Only the 790 that are still the business are offered as links.1,135
Why this page exists. A directory is a claim that the things in it are real. Every directory in this space asks you to take that on trust, because the alternative is admitting how much of it was wrong — and a scraped import can arrive full of businesses that were generated rather than found, with addresses invented from the trade and phone numbers that ring nobody. That happened here, more than once, and the honest response is not to be quieter about it. It is to publish the count. The directory is what survived all of this.