Sam is the 13-year-old protagonist of the story and an introspective, thoughtful narrator. He has an interest in building things and wants to be an architect. He is the youngest of two children and the son of a famous Civil Rights activist. He feels inferior to his father and brother. At the beginning of the story, Sam gives up on things too easily and tends to retreat when things are too complicated or chaotic. Throughout much of the novel, Sam is conflicted between his father’s peaceful protest ideology, which he associates with his childhood innocence, and his brother’s non-passive Black Panther ideology. While Sam comes to respect the ease and effectiveness of the Black Panthers’ methods, he decides in the end that violence will not solve the injustice of his brother’s death, and he plans to forge his own path forward in the Civil Rights movement apart from his father and Stick’s influences.

Stick is Sam’s older brother, and Sam looks up to him. Sam explains, “Stick was the type who gathered lots of friends and admirers, had girls coming after him and all of that” (42). Stick is gifted in writing and speaking, like his father, but he differs from his father in the approach he supports for realizing the goals of the Civil Rights movement.