Wes Moore Talk Rescheduled

October 05, 2011 |

Photo by Amunankhra House

Wes Moore—a youth advo­cate, busi­ness leader, and author—will present a free, public talk on Wednesday, October 5, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hyman Forum of Goucher College's Athenaeum.

This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved by logging onto www.goucher.edu/tickets.

His autobiographical book The Other Wes Moore was Goucher's 2011 summer reading assignment for incoming first-year and transfer students. It is the story of two kids with the same name, both liv­ing in Baltimore City. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, dec­o­rated com­bat vet­eran, White House Fel­low, and busi­ness leader. The other is serv­ing a life sen­tence in prison for felony mur­der.

For more information about this event, contact Kristen Keener, director of media relations, at 410-337-6316.

Moore was born in Maryland in 1978 and was three years old when his father, a respected radio and tele­vi­sion host, died in front of him. His mother, hop­ing for a bet­ter future for her fam­ily, made great sac­ri­fices to send Moore and his sis­ters to pri­vate school.

Caught between two worlds—the afflu­ence of his class­mates and the strug­gles of his neighbors—Moore began to act out, suc­cumb­ing to bad grades, sus­pen­sions, and delin­quen­cies. Des­per­ate to reverse his behav­ior, his mother sent him to mil­i­tary school in Penn­syl­va­nia. After try­ing to escape five times, Moore finally decided to stop rail­ing against the sys­tem and become account­able for his actions. By grad­u­a­tion six years later, Moore was com­pany com­man­der oversee­ing 125 cadets.

On Decem­ber 11, 2000, The Bal­ti­more Sun ran an arti­cle about how Moore, despite his trou­bled child­hood, had just received a Rhodes Schol­ar­ship. At the same time, The Sun was run­ning sto­ries—even­tu­ally more than 100 in all—about four African-American men who were arrested for the mur­der of an off-duty Bal­ti­more police offi­cer dur­ing a spec­tac­u­larly botched armed rob­bery. One of the men con­victed was just two years older than Moore; lived in the same neigh­bor­hood; and, in an uncanny turn, was also named Wes Moore.

Moore just could not shake off the unset­tling coin­ci­dence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same news­pa­per. After fol­low­ing the story of the rob­bery, the man­hunt, and the trial to its con­clu­sion, he wrote a let­ter to the other Wes, now a con­victed mur­derer serving a life sen­tence with­out the pos­si­bil­ity of parole. His let­ter ten­ta­tively asked the ques­tions that had been haunt­ing him: Who are you? How did this happen?

Moore real­ized in their two sto­ries was a much larger tale about the con­se­quences of per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity and the imper­a­tive­ness of edu­ca­tion and com­mu­nity for a gen­er­a­tion of boys search­ing for their way. The result was Moore's first book, The Other Wes Moore, which was pub­lished in April 2010.

He has been fea­tured by such media out­lets as Peo­ple Mag­a­zine, The New York Times, The Wash­ing­ton Post, CSPAN, and MSNBC.