Discovering Wes Moore Study Guide

Wes Moore was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, to a mother who had immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica as a child and a father who pursued a respected career in broadcast journalism. When Moore was three years old, his father died, and within a few years his mother moved the family up to the Bronx, where her parents still lived. Moore grew up in a neighborhood with a high prevalence of crime, an atmosphere he escaped when his mother sent him to military school, where he remained through junior college, achieving impressive military credentials. From there he earned a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. He later won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Following his time in graduate school, he served in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006. He subsequently worked for several years as an investment banker in New York City. Moore wrote his memoir The Other Wes Moore in 2010, which he later adapted into a book geared toward younger readers, Discovering Wes Moore. Throughout the 2010s, Moore became involved in political causes, and he headed the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization, from 2017 to 2021. Having long considered entering politics, he ran in the 2022 race for Governor of Maryland and won. He currently holds that office.

The stories of both Wes Moores take place against the backdrop of significant political and social upheavals in Black American communities in the latter part of the 20th century. The 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., devastated American inner cities, which already experienced higher rates of poverty, crime, and violence due in large part to the redlining practices enforced earlier in the 20th century (which effectively withheld financial services from neighborhoods with significant minority populations), further exacerbated the atmosphere of urban poverty and hopelessness in which both Wes Moores grow up . Cuts in the 1980s to the budget for federally funded Pell Grants for college tuition had a large impact on Black communities, including the other Wes Moore’s mother, who had to drop out of Johns Hopkins University when her grant funding was withdrawn. Finally, the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s also played a large role in introducing American inner cities with guns and gang violence, as well as involving young children in criminal activities.

Discovering Wes Moore is a memoir geared toward younger readers which Moore adapted from his previous memoir, The Other Wes Moore. The Other Wes Moore treats the same story in greater detail and offers more specific political analysis. Other memoirs written by aspiring politicians include Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and Joe Biden’s Promise Me Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Books dealing with the Bronx in the 1980s include Larry Kirwan’s novel Rockin’ the Bronx, and Jill Jonnes’ historical account, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. Also of note is Robert Caro’s 1974 biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which deals with transformations in policy and infrastructure in New York City throughout the middle decades of the 20th century. Among the books Moore cites as inspirations in Discovering Wes Moore are the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Colin Powell.