The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Tony was the closest thing Wes had to a role model. But the more he tried to be like his brother, the more his brother rejected him. The more he copied him, the more Tony pushed back. Wes wanted to be just like Tony. Tony wanted Wes to be nothing like him.

But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.

The irony of the situation forced me to smile, featuring my newly cracked tooth. Years earlier, I had run through these same woods with all of my might, looking for safety, trying to get away from campus. Tonight, I ran through the same woods looking for safety, but in the other direction.

“I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.”

The bitter riots were sparked by King’s assassination, but the fuels that kept them burning were the preexisting conditions: illegal but strictly enforced racial segregation, economic contraction, and an unresponsive political system. Looters ran free as the city exploded with anger. White neighborhoods in Baltimore blockaded their streets, attempt

But the real discovery was that our two stories together helped me to untangle some of the larger story of our generation of young men, boys who came of age during a historically chaotic and violent time and emerged to succeed and fail in unprecedented ways.

Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.

I listened in amazement and horror as, through trembling lips, she talked about the hopelessness the people felt during this time and the pain of knowing that this level of segregation, this level of poverty, this level of depression was being imposed on a people for things they were in no way responsible for, or should be ashamed of.

Colored was a concept created during the apartheid era to further isolate the races—coloreds received more privileges than blacks did. Not many more, but enough to seed antagonism between the two groups. The lighter your skin was in apartheid South Africa, the better off you were.