Who is Jarrett Maupin? Man behind Phoenix's police protests is a rights leader — and a paid political consultant

In July, the Rev. Jarrett Maupin organized two high-profile protests in Phoenix, the latest in his years of public activism. Who is Jarrett Maupin, and what does he do? He says he fights for civil rights. He also says he gets paid to back causes.

The Rev. Jarrett Maupin could sense that some in the crowd wanted to do more than just take over the streets.

It was a Friday in early July. A protest march against police brutality was moving through downtown Phoenix. But in the crowd, there were calls to take the march onto the freeway and shut it down.

Maupin had single-handedly orchestrated this march — single-handedly, because many other people had wanted it not to happen.

It came one day after five officers were murdered by a gunman at the end of a similar march in Dallas. African-American leaders in Phoenix, as well as the police chief, had asked Maupin to delay his protest. Maupin persisted, tapping a sense of outrage and drawing hundreds of people into the streets.

Now, there was buzz about shutting down Interstate 10 — a dangerous move that had not been part of the plan.

Maupin arrived at an impromptu solution: He would bluff.

Phoenix protest: Arrests, pepper spray, and an I-10 bluff

He would announce that the group would march onto the freeway — even though he had no intention of doing so, he said in an interview later.

The fib, he thought, would cause authorities to ramp up their force to prevent the marchers from heading to the interstate. And the rebellious elements in the flock behind him, their demands seemingly met, would be temporarily placated.

In front of a Maricopa County building on Washington Street, Maupin made his announcement. “I can take you onto the freeway," he said, trying to bring order to what had been at times an unruly crowd. "But you have to get in line."

As Maupin led the crowd toward Seventh Street, the first part of his ploy seemed to work. Phoenix Police Chief Joe Yahner, already at the march as a show of goodwill, walked alongside Maupin, telling him pointedly and directly that going on the freeway would not happen.

Maupin, monitoring social media on his phone, learned that police had blocked the on-ramps to Interstate 10. He also saw officers amassing along Washington Street, some in riot gear. Traffic was backing up on the freeway. It was enough of a disruption, Maupin thought, to sell to the crowd following him.

Maupin said he asked people to spread the word: There was no need to go on the freeway anymore. The mere threat had accomplished the goal without putting anyone, including the seniors and children among the marchers, at risk.

Maupin also amplified the perils. “We made up things,” he said in an interview the day after the downtown Phoenix march. “I told organizers, ‘Tell them it’s a Class 4 felony to take a minor on the freeway.’ We just started scaring people.”

As the march headed north on Seventh Street, Maupin’s plan was to turn west on Van Buren Street and head back to City Hall, where the event had started about two hours earlier.

John Goodie, a longtime civil-rights activist from Mesa, said he was up at the front of the crowd alongside Maupin. Goodie said the front line of the march made a left turn on Van Buren, but a little ways down the block, he and Maupin looked back to see that some people had continued north on Seventh Street toward the freeway.

MORE: 2 Phoenix councilmen say protests draining police resources

Goodie said Maupin uttered a curse word. Then he hustled north to reach the front of the new pack. “He did make an effort to try and corral the young pups,” Goodie said. “But the train was moving.”

Police in riot gear blocked Seventh Street at Fillmore Street. It was a show of force that Maupin claimed he had called for, via the plainclothes officers that were marching alongside him. (Sgt. Jon Howard, a Phoenix police spokesman, disputed that, saying the blockade was ordered by commanders at the scene.)

Some protesters threw water bottles — some filled with rocks or other objects — at officers. Police responded by shooting balls of pepper spray over the heads of the crowd. While some marchers scattered, others became more defiant, approaching the line and shouting at officers. Three men would be arrested on this night; their cases are under review.

Maupin said he approached one teenager and hugged him close. Maupin said he did that so no one could hear what he was about to shout in his ear. He said he called the teen the N-word and said, “If you don’t stop, I’m going to kick your ass.”

Another protester grabbed at the symbol Maupin wears around his neck, which Maupin says in an Ethiopian military medal that once belonged to the civil-rights leader Adam Clayton Powell Jr., but which also looks a bit like a sheriff's badge.

The protester asked if Maupin was a cop.

“I’m a minister,” Maupin said he told him. “Get your goddamned hands off me.”

The Rev. Jarrett Maupin can be described in many ways.

He is a firebrand of a civil-rights activist. He has a penchant for the theatrical and an innate understanding of what will get him television and newspaper coverage. Elements of the city's black community have distanced themselves from him; one Baptist minister, the Rev. Warren Stewart Jr., said he will "no longer speak his name." But Maupin is still seemingly able to summon a crowd at will.

Maupin, 28, is also a felon, having been convicted in federal court of making a false statement to the FBI.

He has also, according to court documents, agreed to pay restitution to three people and one business.

The reverend also has an appetite for earthly pleasures. He likes cigars and spirits. After the downtown Phoenix march July 8, he strolled to the hip eatery Hanny's for a martini.

And Maupin, married since 2007, says he enjoys being around attractive women. He has heard people criticize his assistants for wearing skin-tight mini-dresses.

"There's no law that says you have to be ugly to do civil rights," he said. "Just because your secretary’s ugly don’t mean mine has to be ugly."

Maupin is also a businessman, a political consultant. He incorporated his company, Rara Avis, in April. But he has been doing this type of work for hire since at least 2013, when he spoke out against the building of a WinCo warehouse grocery store proposed for the northwest suburb of Surprise.

He has advocated for billboards near freeways, nightclubs in suburbia and the building of a large convenience store in downtown Phoenix. For the latter, a Circle K, he returned two years later to speak before state officials, helping to make sure the store got a liquor license.

Maupin won't specify which work he did for pay, but he said he has a particular set of skills that make him both an effective civil-rights leader and an effective political operative. “I’m a mystic,” he said. “I hear the inaudible; I see the invisible; I touch the intangible; and I will do the unthinkable."

He said that businesses in a jam want to hire him for a more concrete reason. “People still call me, I think, because of this,” he said, slapping his arm to indicate his skin.

Maupin does not see a conflict in the fact he sometimes speaks as a reverend advocating for racial justice and sometimes speaks at the behest of developers or politicians. “You can’t separate church and state,” Maupin said. “I look at (issues) from a faith perspective and the best political outcome and try to force it.”

This mingling of motives does trouble a man Maupin considers his mentor, the Rev. Luther Holland, who retired to Arizona six years ago. The two met when Maupin preached for a time at the church Holland attends, the First Congregationalist Church in downtown Phoenix.

"As a clergy person," Holland said, "I would hope that his faith leads him in his business dealings. But is that always a fact? I can't testify to that. We disagree on many issues."

Holland said he hoped Maupin would be more transparent about when he is speaking as a man of faith and when as a man of political expedience.

"I think there are times he needs to explain what side of Maupin this is," Holland said. "But I think a wise person can discern what's going on and why it's going on."

Jarrett Maupin was 6 years old, and the milk in the school cafeteria was warm, sour and served in foil pouches.

So, as he tells the story, he started a protest.

After a weeklong strike, Maupin said, the school switched brands, serving milk in cold cartons.

Maupin’s family had jobs with the city of Phoenix and it allowed them, and him, access to mayors, council members and other officials. Maupin’s grandmother, Opal Ellis, was a longtime leader in Phoenix, working for the Urban League and appearing on panels about the black power movement. So he learned activism early.

Maupin said he wrote a letter to the Rev. Al Sharpton in 2002 and was astonished that Sharpton responded. The teenager became Sharpton's "man on the ground" in Phoenix, Maupin said. By 2005, Sharpton made Maupin, then a high-school student, the youth director of his National Action Network and installed him as the director of the Arizona chapter.

Maupin adopted Sharpton as his mentor. He also adopted Sharpton's signature wavy hairstyle, which Maupin's godmother set and styled twice a week.

Maupin held his first news conference and protest in March 2004. An African-American student at a Scottsdale high school had been suspended for wearing his baseball cap sideways. Maupin had students march and chant outside of the school.

The protest was effective. The school reduced the student's suspension. The pressure worked.

Next, Maupin took up the cause of taxi drivers upset with their working conditions. Under Maupin's direction, a few dozen cabs parked side by side along Washington Street, in front of Phoenix City Hall, on a weekday afternoon blocking all but one lane of traffic. The blockade lasted four hours.

Maupin got more ambitious. At 17, before he could legally vote, he decided to run for city council. He went up against a more established candidate for what had been the historically black seat on the council, representing the south Phoenix district where he grew up.

He lost. But it gained him attention.

Around that time, Maupin added a title to his name, becoming "the reverend."

Maupin told The Republic in 2005 that he was ordained through the First New Life Missionary Baptist Church. In July, he told The Republic he was first ordained as a Pentecostal elder at a Church of God in Christ in 2006, but preferred the title "reverend" to "elder."

In 2011, he said, he gave up his Pentecostal membership and became a Baptist preacher at the Greater New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, south of downtown Phoenix. According to the church's website, Maupin was licensed as a minister in 2011. Two others listed in the church's online directory are described as first being licensed, then later ordained.

The Rev. Maupin became a go-to source whenever a civil-rights issue occurred.

He spoke out against a proposed initiative that would deny in-state college tuition to students without authorization to be in the country. He raised questions about the burning death of a 9-year-old boy that a police department had quickly ruled accidental. He protested a superintendent of the Phoenix Union district, even getting arrested at a meeting after holding a one-man sit-in when the board would not allow him to speak.

Maupin won a seat on the Phoenix Union board that year. He said he built his campaign partly around that arrest.

In 2007, his National Action Network rented office space in a storefront on East McDowell Road. By 2008, an article in The Republic referred to Maupin as a “rising young civil-rights leader.”

Then, Maupin decided to run for mayor, taking on the incumbent, Phil Gordon.

Gordon, in a routine political move, challenged the petition signatures that Maupin turned in. Enough were found invalid to get Maupin removed from the ballot.

Maupin was outraged. "I think I have been targeted because of my race, age, the content of my character, and my platform," he said at the time. Maupin threatened a recall.

But Maupin would take another route to, according to his later sworn statement in a federal plea agreement, “hurt the Mayor politically.”

In 2008, Maupin told  the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office something he would later confess was not true.

According to a later plea agreement, he claimed he had seen a videotape that showed Gordon engaged in "criminal activity." The court papers don't describe that conduct. Maupin said his claim was the tape showed sexual activity with a boy.

"That was all false," Gordon said.

Roberts: Jarrett Maupin accused Phoenix mayor of WHAT?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office spent months investigating the tale. It could find no evidence because, according to the statement Maupin later signed as part of his plea, there was no such tape. Two detectives from the sex-crime unit said they were pulled into the Gordon investigation, which kept them away from investigating legitimate sex-crime cases.

Arpaio, reached by phone, declined to discuss the Gordon investigation.

The FBI took over the investigation. According to his sworn statement, Maupin said he talked to the agency on Sept. 16, 2008. He repeated the Gordon allegations and penned a handwritten statement with the same.

He was arrested and charged with making a false report to federal law enforcement. He pleaded guilty to the felony offense in April 2009. He agreed to give up his seat on the school board.

Maupin said in an a July interview that he regretted the incident. He felt compelled, he said, to alert authorities when an acquaintance came to him with the tip. "I should have ignored him," he said. "I felt terrible."

The FBI also investigated other aspects of Maupin’s life. As part of the plea agreement, Maupin agreed to pay restitution to three people involved in what court documents describe as "peripheral incidents."

He owed one woman $21,000 in restitution for funds she had given so that Maupin could provide legal defense for her son, despite the fact Maupin was not an attorney, according to the plea agreement.

He also agreed to pay back another woman $6,435 for “his misuse of a power of attorney, and related conduct,” according to the plea agreement. A man was owed $900.

Maupin said during an interview in July that he was innocent on those counts. But he pleaded guilty because of the pressure federal authorities brought. He feared they would wrongly target his wife, an immigrant from Mexico.

"I didn't plead guilty because of the Phil Gordon stuff," he said, maintaining his innocence. "I pleaded guilty so my wife wouldn't be deported."

Gordon said he was fine with Maupin getting probation, rather than prison. "I still have ties and memories to his grandmother," said Gordon, who knew Maupin's grandmother through her civil-rights work. He said he didn't want Maupin to have his life ruined.

For the false-reporting crime, Maupin was sentenced to five years’ probation in September 2009.

Maupin worked as a bookkeeper and supervisor at Instant Wireless, a cellular phone store, according to court records. He left there for a job at the Microsoft store, and also worked, for three days, at a Factory 2-U store, according to documents.

In 2011, Maupin’s probation officer recommended his probation be revoked.

There were issues with not notifying the officer about changing jobs and with not paying restitution as ordered.

In October 2011, a judge deemed Maupin a flight risk and ordered him detained pending a hearing.

Maupin would serve more than a month in prison. By this time, he had a lower-maintenance hairstyle: a shaved head.

In court filings leading up to the hearing, government attorneys said that Maupin “appears to be grooming another victim who is anticipating a large monetary payment.”

That woman was Elvira Fernandez. Her son had been shot by a Phoenix police officer who had been subsequently fired and convicted of manslaughter. Fernandez had filed a suit against the city.

Maupin, in a court document filed by his attorney, said he was not after the woman's money. The filing pointed to a sworn statement from Fernandez denying that Maupin coerced her to set up a trust that would give Maupin "access to any potential monies recovered in connection with her pending lawsuit.”

The document also said that Maupin had agreed to pay the Instant Wireless store a portion of his final paycheck to make up for funds missing from cash registers he was assigned to operate. Maupin,according to the document, "vehemently denies stealing any money," but agreed to pay in “an effort to put this matter behind him.”

At the November 2011 hearing, the judge ordered Maupin sentenced to the time he had served and a new three-year probation term.

Maupin would walk out of custody and continue the career he had started a few months before: one that had him taking his skills as a civil-rights activist into the business world.

The way Jason Rose, the Scottsdale public-relations man, remembers it, Maupin came to him at the advice of a reporter.

After the federal conviction, Maupin’s image needed rehabilitating. And in this city, Rose is known for what his website calls "crisis communications." Family-man politician going through messy divorce involving an affair? Officers finding an elected official parked on the side of a freeway physically fighting with his girlfriend? Rose gets the call.

“We hit it off well,” Rose said of Maupin in a phone interview.

Rose said Maupin was never a paying client, nor did Rose ever pay Maupin. “We developed a friendship over the years," he said.

That friendship resulted in Maupin starting to bring arguments of economic justice and racial equality into places where they are not usually found. Like meetings of zoning commissions.

In May 2010, Maupin spoke in favor of a nightclub, Phase 54, slated to open in what had been a furniture store in Chandler. Neighboring family-style chain restaurants complained about the nightclub and went to court to stop it from opening. Maupin attended the hearing and afterward told reporters that he would threaten a boycott of the restaurants.

At the time, Phase 54 was represented by Rose’s public-relations agency.

After Maupin was released from custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons, he started holding news conferences and appearing at public meetings for causes with ties to Rose.

Maupin was treated like a client at the firm, said Stacy Pearson, a former employee at the Rose agency who is now with the left-leaning political firm Strategies 360. She recalled at least one meeting where Maupin met with agency staff and discussed ways to improve his image and profile. Pearson said she had no information about whether Maupin paid the firm, or was paid by the firm.

Maupin, in an interview this month, boasted about Rose asking him to help clients. “There’s only one person that Jason Rose calls when he can’t get the job done, and he calls me,” Maupin said.

Maupin spoke out about a Becker Boards billboard installed along a Glendale freeway, which he said could bring needed revenue to poorer sections of town. He asked that the owners of Amy's Baking Company, who became notorious on a Fox reality show, be granted forgiveness. Both were Rose clients.

Maupin also held news conferences protesting various actions of Arizona Public Service. Rose represents solar-energy clients that have battled the public utility.

Rose said he couldn't recall the details of all those transactions, but said it would be incorrect to think Maupin acts on his behalf. "Jarrett is his own man," Rose said.

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Maupin was against the building of a WinCo warehouse grocery store in Surprise — before he was for it.

Maupin said in July that he had changed his mind for financial reasons. The person who hired him to oppose WinCo didn’t pay him enough. So, he went to the pro-WinCo side. The grocer was represented legally by Jordon Rose, the wife of Jason Rose.

“I’ve made it my tradition to say, 'You don’t pay me X, Y and Z, I will go to the other side, for free,' ” Maupin said. He was speaking generally, but later verified that he was speaking also about the WinCo case.

In 2013, Maupin opposed Glendale's contract with the Coyotes hockey team, calling for it to be referred to voters. He also argued for a tribal casino to be allowed near Glendale. In both cases, he said he was arguing for the economic interests of tax-paying residents.

Maupin also has become involved in municipal issues in Phoenix, aligning himself with the faction of the city council often opposed to the mayor.

After a video of City Councilman Michael Nowakowski surfaced in March that showed him decrying advances in gay rights at a meeting of Christian pastors, Maupin held a news conference defending him.

Maupin also claims close ties to Councilman Sal DiCiccio.

"His staff gave me my talking points about the city budget," Maupin said. "We work on all kinds of things."

DiCiccio said he didn't give Maupin specific talking points, but most likely gave him the same list of budget highlights he shared with everybody.

"We've had an open line of communication for years," DiCiccio said.

Maupin said he has drawn closer to conservative politicians because, in Arizona, they are in power.

Maupin still does activist work for free. Lonny MacDougall of Chandler said he called Maupin in summer 2013 after his son and four other students were told by the board that governs Arizona high-school athletics that they would be ineligible to play basketball during their senior year. Maupin successfully argued the case before the association, MacDougall said.

MacDougall's son, Connor, played for the basketball team at Corona Del Sol that year that won the state championship.

MacDougall said Maupin made the boys' cause one of fairness and justice. "And there was never a whisper of the bill," MacDougall said.

Maupin does charge some clients. Some he has on retainer, he said, but most of his work comes by the job, with people needing his help in a crisis. He said he was not paid to advocate for the Circle K, nor was he paid to argue at the state Legislature this session on the need for payday loans. But he would not disclose any particular clients that paid him for his advocacy, speaking only generally.

“A lot of white people in this town come to me when they have an issue,” Maupin said.

He said he was fine with being useful to his clients because of his race.

“I’m OK being the guy who gets some things done,” Maupin said. “I can’t get everything done, but I get a lot of things done.

“And you know why that is? I’m still Mr. Black Power. I’m still Mr. Civil Rights. I’m still going to piss white people off.”

Maupin often stands alone in his activism, not often working in lockstep with other African-American leaders. The pace, he said, was wearying.

“We need more of me,” he said. “I’m just one of me. What if I want to retire?"

Maupin said he and his father wanted to buy a beach house next year in the Bimini islands, a section of the Bahamas just off the Florida coast.

"I’m doing all this consulting work, saving up money, so I can (retire)."

Where exactly he saves his money became the subject of another court action.

One evening in December 2014, a process server arrived at the Tanner Chapel, the Methodist church in downtown Phoenix.

The process server handed Maupin a notice to appear in court over a judgment against him from 2009. The landlord of the building on McDowell Road that Maupin had leased for the National Action Network in 2007 sued, saying he hadn’t been paid rent. The court issued one default judgment in 2009 and renewed it in 2014, ordering that Maupin owned $49,024.95.

Maupin appeared for a court hearing in May 2015. Minutes of the proceeding show it was brief and that Maupin then met with attorneys for the landlord.

Matt Koglmeier, the attorney whose firm handled the case, said that Maupin claimed to have no assets.

“He claims not to have any home, no vehicles, no assets, no bank accounts, nothing,” Koglmeier said in a phone interview. "If he’s telling the truth, I don’t know how he lives.”

Maupin said in an interview in July that he indeed had no assets and lives just above the poverty level. His business has an account, but he has no personal one. He and his wife, he said, live with his father in the home that used to belong to his grandmother, who has since died. He also doesn't have a car. Friends and assistants drive him where he needs to be.

Koglmeier said he’s not sure if his client would pursue Maupin further, saying that continuing to press the claim might be “chasing good money after bad.”

When Maupin was served with court papers at the church that December, it was just before he was to take part in a community discussion of police brutality. It was a cause that would align him briefly with African-American leaders in the city, forming the state's Black Lives Matter movement.

The Rev. Reginald Walton, who would become chairman of the Arizona group, said during a July interview, "I was leery of allowing him to be a participant."

Maupin, though, had already made himself part of the movement. He garnered national attention with a protest of a mentally troubled woman who officers shot in 2014 after she came at them with a claw hammer.

Maupin said he had been praying over how to draw attention to the death of the woman, Michelle Cusseaux.

“The Lord spoke to me,” Maupin said. “He said, ‘Take Michelle down there.’ "

Maupin arranged for a hearse to pull up outside Phoenix police headquarters in August 2014. A group of pallbearers drew out a casket that Maupin said contained Cusseaux’s body.

It was an attention-getting tactic, but one that not all black leaders agreed with.

“A lot of tactics Maupin employs are just not effective,” said J. Johnson, an investigator with the People’s Law Firm. Johnson said the Phoenix Police Department has been working with the African-American community for years, and Maupin’s parading around a coffin served little purpose other then provocation.

Still, Maupin was part of the state’s Black Lives Matter group at its formation.

That would change a few weeks later after a television news segment aired showing Maupin taking part in a simulation set up by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Maupin and Troy Hayden, an anchor for television station Fox 10, put themselves in the role of officers. Deputies acted out the role of bad guys. Maupin was handed a realistic-looking firearm that shot paintball rounds. He had to decide whether to shoot at the perceived threats approaching him.

Maupin, in the segment, said the experience was eye-opening. He said it taught him that people should simply comply with police orders.

The station said that within 24 hours, more than 2 million people viewed the segment, headlined: “Activist critical of police undergoes use of force scenarios.” Several police departments sent the clip out through social-media channels.

For Walton, it was the exact wrong message. “Mr. Maupin pretty much put the blame on black people, that if you comply you won’t get shot,” he said.

Maupin said the training helped the movement. "Somebody needed to do it," he said, "so police couldn't say we hadn't tried to see it from their perspective."

Maupin left that group. Walton said he was ordered out; Maupin said he left on his own.

Maupin said he still represents elements of the Black Lives Matter movement, saying it was designed to not be a hierarchical group.

Walton said Maupin’s theatrics treat the movement as a game. “This is bigger than a press opportunity,” he said. “This is bigger than ego. People are hurting. People want to see change. People want to see things being done.”

On the Friday evening one week after the downtown Phoenix protest that ended in clouds of pepper spray, Maupin sat at the bar of Churchill’s Cigar Lounge, sipping an Old Fashioned and smoking a cigarillo.

He was 2 miles and about two hours away from a planned sit-in protest he said would shut down the intersection of 24th Street and Camelback Road, among the city’s busiest.

Earlier in the week, he had talked about forcing mass arrests, how he would bring out seniors and people in wheelchairs for officers to drag away.

In the days since, he had backed off such talk. Maupin said he had been talking by phone during the week with Yahner, the police chief. Maupin said he would cancel the protest if Yahner agreed to meet him in public and let Maupin present him with a list of a dozen police reforms he had drawn up.

On Friday afternoon, Maupin said he had struck a deal. His protesters would be able to have a sit-in and block the intersection. After a few minutes, enough to sing some spirituals, Maupin said, the chief would show up and receive the list of demands.

Maupin left the cigar lounge around 7 p.m. An assistant drove him to the Arizona Biltmore resort. Another driver picked them both up. Maupin was dropped off just south of the intersection where protesters were gathering.

Six plainclothes officers escorted him to Camelback Road.

Maupin grabbed a megaphone and started reading his list of 12 demands to the crowd of reporters and protesters around him. He then asked people to sign an oversize copy of the list.

About 8:30 p.m., Maupin told the crowd he would lead them across the street. He said the protesters needed to be orderly and remain behind him or “you will have a serious problem.”

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Maupin, standing on the southwestern corner of the intersection, told the crowd to cross and stretch from one side of 24th Street to the other. “Hear what I said?” he shouted. “Hear what I said? We are not going in the middle of the intersection.”

Maupin walked backward into the street, nearly tripping over the center median. He tried to get the crowd to spread out, but they remained gathered in a circle around him. Many held out their phones documenting the scene on cameras.

Traffic on Camelback Road continued flowing. Left turns were allowed onto northbound 24th Street. But traffic on a portion of 24th Street was detoured about a quarter-mile away.

Maupin sat on the asphalt for a few seconds, but with few joining him in the sit-in, he stood and grabbed the megaphone again. He praised the fact that “several hundred people” — a charitable estimate — had gathered. “Let’s celebrate our victory,” he said. “The chief is here.”

Yahner came towards Maupin from the east side of the street. He hugged the mother of Cusseaux, the woman shot and killed by police. Maupin then handed Yahner the demands and said, “Chief, this comes from the heart of the people.”

Yahner shook Maupin’s hand and, while he did, said, “You’re going to be leaving the street accordingly, correct?” Maupin told him, “That’s right.”

Yahner grabbed the poster-sized paper and walked back to the sidewalk, handing it to a uniformed officer beside him along the way.

Yahner, in a brief interview following the meeting with Maupin, said the two had talked that afternoon, their only phone call of the week. Yahner said he told Maupin that he would not allow him to block the intersection. Maupin, he said, agreed to block only one of the four crossings, on the condition Yahner showed up to meet him.

Yahner agreed, with some concessions. “I’ll pick the direction, one direction,” Yahner said. “You’re in the street less than five minutes.”

That night, Maupin complied. He cleared the street and led the crowd the rest of the way across 24th Street. He briefly addressed the crowd while standing in front of the Camby hotel tower. He called for a moratorium on marches and protests. The battle would move to the halls of power, in council meetings, subcommittee meetings and policy sessions.

“We’re going to keep on fighting,” he said through a megaphone. “It’s policy time now.”

The protest was underwhelming for Trina Washington, 38, who lives in south Phoenix. She had attended the march the previous Friday and said she got chills from the energy radiating through the crowd. Not tonight. “We just walked across the street,” she said. “We even walked in the crosswalk.”

Maupin headed south along 24th Street where he expected to be picked up. He was still being followed by a crowd of reporters and protesters, but he said he was done for the night. “I can’t fit everybody in my car,” he told the people following him. It was time to disperse.

Olivia Davis, 20, of Phoenix, looked on with a stunned expression. “This guy’s going home,” she said. “This was so short. We haven’t even been here an hour."

Maupin did not go home. He went to the Arizona Biltmore where, by 9:30 p.m, he pulled another cigarillo from the pack in his pocket and smoked it while standing on the resort’s lawn. He would also order a whiskey sour.

Maupin said he could sense that some protesters were not happy with the evening, but he still called it a success. “Angry, frustrated,” he said, “but non-violent.”

A television station that night had misreported that Maupin had been convicted of a drug crime in 2009. He hadn’t. It was someone with a similar name. Maupin said he might talk with an attorney the next day about possible legal action.

Or, he said, he might come back to the Arizona Biltmore. From his perch on the lawn, he could see groups of college-age women in cocktail dresses walk past. A national sorority was having its convention at the Biltmore that weekend. The reverend joked that it might be a good day to hang out by the pool.