DeWayne Wickham

When Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stepped before a bank of microphones last Saturday for a hastily called news conference, she was surrounded by people she credited with helping keep this city calm during a weeklong protest over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody.

One of them was the Rev. Jamal Bryant, pastor of Baltimore’s Empowerment Temple AME Church and a circuit-riding activist, who, more often than not, can be found in the streets with protesters, not standing alongside a target of demonstrators.

When people from across the country massed in Sanford, Fla., three years ago to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who was shot to death by wannabe cop George Zimmerman, Rev. Bryant went there to lead a demonstration outside city hall.

Last year, Rev. Bryant was arrested in Ferguson, Mo., while protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown, another unarmed black teenager. Rev. Bryant was taken into custody when he and other members of a group of pastors and rabbis tried to enter police headquarters to see a police commander.

But now that protesters are in the streets of Baltimore demanding a full accounting of what happened to Mr. Gray, Rev. Bryant finds himself straddling the chasm that divides this city.

“It’s painful because it is so familiar,” he told me earlier in the day on Saturday, before the protests turned violent. What is familiar to him is that an unarmed young black man died at the hands of someone who claimed to have been acting within the law.

But Baltimore also is different, Rev. Bryant said, because it has a black mayor, a black police chief, a majority black City Council, a black chief prosecutor — and the expectation that these black leaders won’t keep the truth of what happened to Mr. Gray from the city’s majority-black population.

Although some black ministers have called for the resignation of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, Rev. Bryant said, “We’ve got to give him a little more time to give us some answers.”

He said the mayor is “fighting with her hands tied behind her back” because of a Maryland law that lets cops who are being investigated for wrongdoing delay giving a statement to investigators for up to 10 days. The law, Rev. Bryant said, puts the mayor in a “rough, tenuous place.”

The mayor tried to maneuver through that troubled terrain at her news conference. She condemned “a small group of agitators” for the violence that spoiled a day in which thousands of peaceful protesters turned out to decry Mr. Gray’s death. She also praised law enforcement officers who worked hard to contain the violence.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake, 45, and Rev. Bryant, 43, are scions of prominent black Baltimore families. The mayor’s father — Howard “Pete” Rawlings — was a powerful member of the Maryland legislature, where for many years he chaired the Appropriations Committee of the House of Delegates. Rev. Bryant’s father and grandfather, who both became bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, did stints as pastor of Bethel AME Church, one of Baltimore’s most politically influential religious institutions.

Under similar circumstances in any other city, Rev. Bryant would be the adversary of the mayor. But in Baltimore, a hometown they share, Rev. Bryant and Mayor Rawlings-Blake are strange bedfellows. Rev. Bryant is a street advocate for justice with access to the inner halls of power.

Rev. Bryant’s greatest challenge will come in the days ahead as Baltimore tries to cap the violence and manage the expectations of those who shout “no justice, no peace” — and really mean it.

The writer is dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication.