It remains to be seen whether, in the long run, this sort of direct action at public events will be effective. But there is no denying this point: The palpable discomfort demonstrations produce force our political figures to grapple with new ideas. This is a productive tension.

Consider that Clinton’s message seems tailor-made for BLM activists concerned about white privilege, institutional power, personal culpability, and political prescriptions for substantive change. She was speaking their language, only they never heard her. John Lewis, while acknowledging the need for young activists to make “good trouble,” also said they “have to respect the right of everybody to be heard,” adding that “you do that in a nonviolent, orderly fashion.” The BLM activists, however, believe that without their actions, Clinton may never have addressed the issues they care about.

A new sensitivity to how black people live in this country has elevated Clinton’s standing.

“Disruption is a tactic that will be here for the long run because a lot of times conversations do not happen without pressure,” Avery Jackson, a 20-year-old Morehouse College student, and one of the protesters, told me. “People want a president of the United States who is going to address this, and if they want us to be quiet, they’re going to have to make some change.”

Julius Jones, the BLM activist who’d met with Clinton in New Hampshire, agreed, characterizing these protests as a valid, and considered, tactic. “Some folks wanted us to yell at her. And some folks wanted us to talk to her,” he told me. “There’s a difference between rejecting the politics of respectability and just a respectful conversation. And it’s really important. But I also feel like the way that you get access, the reason why we were able to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton, is directly because of the actions in Seattle,” when BLM activists went after Bernie Sanders.

For Clinton ultimately to be successful in her run for the presidency—and if she’s going to get there with the support of black people, which she will need—she’s going to have to find a way to speak to both the old generation and the new. And she will need to figure out how to get the heart-system dyad right. One way to do that would be to push BLM to find a broader framework for its concerns than just policing. She had met with BLM activists again after New Hampshire, she said, and was impressed when they’d asked: “‘What about housing? What about education? What about community building? What about trying to make it better for more people to have a chance to succeed?’ I think that’s the right direction. You don’t want to get so broad that you lose focus, but you gotta put what you’re really focused on within a broader context. And I felt they were doing that.” And while Clinton believed that BLM was making progress, it is unclear whether the feeling was mutual.

The activists at Clark protested Clinton for nearly 30 minutes, and for nearly 30 minutes Clinton sought to speak over them. The pro-Clinton crowd grew increasingly irritated and offered chants of their own like “let her talk,” until the young people were escorted from the gym.

“I appreciate the congressman and the mayor having my back,” Clinton chuckled as the crowd roared its approval.

She then began to offer details from her criminal justice platform. She called for more responsible policing, saying “the names of young African American men and women cut down too young is a rebuke to us all,” and an end to racial profiling. She argued that citizens with privilege and power had a responsibility to try to see things as others do, admitting earlier that white Americans had “close[d] our eyes to the truth,” believing that “bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But as you know so well, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”

In her way, Clinton had found that necessary spot, where their calls for changing her heart, and the hearts of white America, dovetailed with her call for altering the system.

Obama never had to face the heat of Black Lives Matter as he ran for office. His slow action on police problems, and his reluctance to confront racial crises, opened a leadership vacuum into which this movement has slipped. Obama has been a big disappointment to many of the black people who, like me, looked to him for leadership. On race, as his conservative opponents like to say about foreign policy, he has led from behind. He has offered lectures about failed black morality but, until recently, avoided embracing race as an issue, for fear that it would damage his ability to “get things done” with the white mainstream.

Which means that Obama has been, until late in his presidency, of little practical use to black folk, the same people who magnified his symbolic value while deflecting attention from his failure to adopt substantive policies to counter, for instance, black unemployment, or persistent intergenerational poverty, or until recently, a criminal justice system that has engulfed the lives of millions of his people. Obama and his fellow Democrats, unlike the BLM activists, have mostly steered safely clear of the folklore of race, the strains of anti-blackness that thread through American history and shape this country’s policies, perspectives, and politics.

Bill Clinton manipulated the racial passions of black folk frustrated at being denied access to the parlors of power. He offered a kind of racial parallelism that suggested—but never delivered—equality between black and white life and privileges. Obama, meanwhile, argued that what was good for America was good for black folk, when exactly the opposite is true: Helping black folk turns out to help America. Tamping down the war on drugs, which targeted black and brown folk, also spared hundreds of thousands of white youth hooked on methamphetamine. Strengthening the social safety net for our most vulnerable black and brown citizens also helped struggling white families hit hard by the recession. Obama’s handsome black face and megawatt smile were enough to blind black folk to the stunning underperformance of his administration on race. If Bill Clinton gave black America bad policy and Obama gave black America no policy, then Hillary Clinton is left only with good policy. She must achieve what her predecessors only promised.

In a sense, Clinton has emerged at precisely what seems like a strikingly unpropitious moment. The boring, the tedious, the serious attention to the small gestures that make big impacts are ill-suited to the unruly temper of the times. But this perceived liability may be her strongest asset to the black masses: She can offer strict attention to policy that unapologetically plays to black needs without ever feeling pressure—as Obama has—to disown, to begrudge the style, of explicit black advance.