Moore, Wesley 'Wes'

Impact on the world

Sworn in as Maryland's 63rd governor in January 2023, becoming the state's first Black governor and the fifth African American to serve as a U.S. state governor overall, after a childhood marked by his father's death when Moore was a toddler and his own arrest at age 11, a contrast he later explored in his bestselling memoir 'The Other Wes Moore.'

Life & background

Born in Maryland and raised partly in New York after his father's death when Moore was a toddler, he was arrested at age 11 before his mother sent him to military school, a turning point that set him on a path to Johns Hopkins University and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He served in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, became an investment banker, and later led the Robin Hood Foundation, a major anti-poverty nonprofit, while authoring several books including 'The Other Wes Moore,' which juxtaposed his own life against that of another Baltimore man with the same name who was serving a life sentence for murder. He won Maryland's 2022 gubernatorial election, taking his oath of office on a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and becoming the state's first Black governor and the fifth African American to serve as a U.S. state governor overall, following Pinchback, Wilder, Patrick, and Paterson; in his inaugural remarks he reflected on how improbable his own journey from a child in handcuffs to governor would have seemed to anyone who knew him at 11 years old.

Sources

1. CBS Baltimore; The Hill; Philadelphia Tribune; National Governors Association (Wes Moore); Britannica (Wes Moore)