Jessica Davis stepped to the microphone, her yellow safety vest marking her as an organizer of the raucous protest overflowing Lawyer’s Mall around her.

She asked for silence. She waited. She asked again.

Quiet. On a Saturday morning in Annapolis, sweat and anticipation filled the thick, quiet air.

Davis took a breath and looked down at her phone. She read out the news that Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband had been assassinated. Another legislator and his wife survived a second attack.

“Violence like this has no place in our country,” she read, the words flowing calm and even. “We cannot and will not allow political hatred to silence public service or instill fear in those who speak for justice and truth.”

Behind her, from somewhere in the sea of faces rising across State Circle to the Maryland State House and then up its granite steps, came an angry shout.

“We can’t hear you!”

So Davis, an Annapolis member of the Free State Coalition, turned and waited as the stage crew rushed to point the black box speakers in the other direction.

And then she calmly read the news again.

“Violence like this has no place in our country,” she began again.

The “No Kings Day” protest in Annapolis, one of two in the city and one of hundreds around Maryland and the nation, began as a strangely happy thing.

How could it not be when Randy Goldberg, a reenactor decked out in George Washington’s buff and blue Continental Army uniform, was ready to take the stage to surrender his commission?

“The great events on which my resignation depended, having at length taken place, I have now the honor of offering my congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country, happy, very happy in the confirmation of our independence,” he said.

The protest was an angry thing, too. How could it not be when people crowded in for speeches and poems and song say President Donald Trump has broken the compact with the country?

Immigration. Tolerance. Science. The Constitution. The parade. California. Everything.

“I went to D.C. thinking I could solve some problems,” freshman Rep. Sarah Elfreth said. “But we have been in the trenches every day, fighting an administration that is destroying the fabric of our country.”

It was an uplift for demonstrators, a thousand people agreeing that what’s happening in Washington and California and now Minnesota is madness, wrapping themselves in the flag to take back a symbol corrupted by cruelty.

“How many of you are federal employees?” Elfreth asked. “How many of you love a federal employee?”

Chanting “No Kings!” “We Are America” and “Stand up and fight!” the crowd swelled with fervor, not just size.

“Hang on to that energy for 18 months,” Elfreth said.

A protest can be a tragic thing.

“Please join me now in a moment of silence to honor their courage,” Davis said, “their service and the urgent need to build a world where disagreement is never met with violence.”

For a moment, the chanting and the shouting stopped.

Police said someone pretending to be a police officer shot Rep. Hortman and her husband, Mark, to death in an “act of targeted political violence” at their home in a Minneapolis suburb.

State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot multiple times at their house in a nearby suburb but remained alive as of Saturday morning.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota planned to speak at an anti-Trump rally in St. Paul, and police said they found papers with “NO KINGS” written on them in the suspect’s car. They warned people in the state to stay away from the planned events.

“Let us hold their families, staff and communities in our hearts, and let this be a call to recommit ourselves to peace, justice and solidarity in the face of hate,” Davis said.

Maybe worst of all, a protest can be a frightening thing.

“I took my Veterans Against Trump stickers off my car,” said a retired Navy captain who asked not to be named. “For the first time, I’m afraid someone might see them and recognize my license plate, find out who I am and take my pension away.”

When violence changes a city — as it has Annapolis — and a person — as it has me — it changes what news that someone else has been targeted for death for what they believe means.

“We’re going to sing the first two choruses of ‘America the Beautiful,’” Mickey Mulany said. “If you can’t find the words, look them up on your phone.”

And the crowd sang together.