With an elegant, sweeping gesture of his right hand, Grant wiped the sweat off his forehead. The hand kept going and raised itself into the air, fist blinking into five outstretched fingers. His palm was white as a fish belly. “The hour has come for the black man to walk in the sunlight with his head held high and his eyes open wide.” His inflection was rising, the voice taking on resonance and power.

“Praise Jesus.”

His left hand aimed like an arrow at the cracked ceiling, toward heaven. “The hour has come for the black man to walk in the sunlight with his head held high and his eyes open wide and a rifle in his hands!”

“Tell the truth!”

“Walk in the sunlight with the Lord!”

“Head up high!”

“Mmm, mmm!”

Ivanhoe Grant was off the desk now, poised on the balls of his feet in the semicircle of listeners, his hands gripping an imaginary rifle. The hot little room rang with his words. “The hour has come for the black man to walk in the sunlight with his head held high and his eyes open wide and a rifle in his hands and his finger on the trigger!”

“Glory be to Jesus!”

“Amen, say it again!”

“Lord, Lord, Lord!”

Norwood wheeled on him, gripped his wrists, and pushed him out of the way. Grant’s eyes flashed, but he did not resist. He had trained himself not to resist until it mattered. In the meantime, just absorb the violence. Let it pass through you. Let them waste their strength fighting what won’t fight back. In time, even Norwood would come around.

“Now, listen to me,” Norwood said. “This has gone far enough. This here’s dangerous talk. A man could find himself strapped to the lynching tree for this kind of talk. Get ahold of yourselves.”

Tom Miller, a real-estate investor and the most enterprising pawnbroker in town, said, “Maybe we’ve had ahold of ourselves too long, John. Maybe it’s time we got ahold of something else.” Miller made loans to lots of white clients, and lately, plenty of them were holding out on their payments, as if daring him to do something about it.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Norwood persisted. “Look, we’ve made progress. We got Red Cross Street paved.”

“Only ‘cause it leads to the railroad station.”

“We’ve got bicycle paths so our men can get to the mills without having to pay for a streetcar. We’ve got ten Negro policemen. We’ve got a closed sanitary sewer in Brooklyn now, instead of an open ditch. And the Negro ward down at City-County—”

“Editor Manly got us those things,” Tom Miller said.

“You think he did it alone? He has been the voice of a united front. The ministers, the lawyers, the businessmen, the workers. And he got them by leaning. A firm, steady push. But no threats, no violence.”