While Wes Moore was being awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study in England, another Wes Moore, who had grown up under the same circumstances in Baltimore, was being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in an armed robbery that took the life of a police officer.
The choices that led two men of roughly the same backgrounds — black boys, the sons of single mothers, growing up in tough circumstances in urban America — to have such different outcomes form the basis of Moore’s best-selling book, “The Other Wes Moore,” and of his Ringling College Library Association Town Hall lecture Thursday morning.
His message: Choices matter, second chances sometimes are last chances, and that expectations are a bigger factor than environment in determining success.
