The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Wes Moore knows that being a leader—both in your personal life and in the business world—comes down to one thing: personal responsibility. Drawing on his experiences as a leader in the public and private sectors and in the military, Moore explains that embracing your own personal responsibility – and holding yourself accountable for your choices – is a quality that makes great "transformational leaders": leaders who create a vision, then inspire and empower those around them to execute that vision. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in an armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Moore couldn’t 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. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? With stories of heart-wrenching losses and moments of surprising redemption, Moore describes a generation of boys trying to find their way in a challenging and, at times, hostile world. More at https://enthompson.unl.edu/