Philip Payton Jr. was not a musician, not a poet, not a painter of portraits or a sculptor of figures. He was an architect of space, a dealer in possibilities, a capitalist whose currency was land and whose strategy was disruption. In the Black American saga, we are often told of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, yet the prologue remains unspoken. How did Harlem become the mecca, the pulsing nerve center of Black culture? The answer, like so many buried in the margins of history, traces back to a man who dared to make racism too expensive to sustain. Payton is one of my favorite people to teach about because his work exemplifies the power of economic strategy in the fight for Black liberation.