In depth. This is our Monthly Program with one author talking about his or her book w and we are pleased ts month to be joined by westmore who is the author of three books plus Childrens Book and the novel. His first book came out in 2010 called the other westmore and cthen his book the work came ot in 2015 and its most recent book is about baltimore during the arrest and death of freddie gray that just came out five days. It is called that but in your book, the work, you write that the militaryta saved your life. What don you mean by that . Guest i think the military played an incredible role in my life where some of the most important times in my life have not been when i was wearing a suit or a a tshirt and jeans bt when i was wearing a uniform from this country. I was first introduced in the military system about 13 years old and i was sent to military school and hand one mandatory year in military school. It was some issues and challenges and my mom was threatening to send me to military school even though i was only eight years old and every year she would send me away i kept blowing her off but the first time i felt handcuffs to my wrist when when i was 11 years old. O my mother noted that i was intentionally hurting people that loved me so i could impress people that care less about me. Finally one day she came up and said i will send you to military school and honestly i thought she was kidding or exaggerating and then finally i realized she wasnt paid she sent to aat mandatory era military school. I hated every minute of it. I remember that first days there and iran away multiple times. Iran away five times in the first four days a military school. I also noticed that the longer i stayed and fully understand what it was that they were trying to teach me and also what was that my mom was trying to teach me and the fact that we did live in an interconnected environment and you know how everybody was doing in my unit mattered to how my unit i as a whole was doing. When i finished high school and had a chance then to go on a basketball scholarship offers i decided that the thing i wanted to do that i wanted to spend my life on was to lead soldiers. That is why i made the decision and so for me the decision to go in to the army was both a continuation of the fact that i had this level of service both on the fact they would help pay for college and that was helpful but there was also this idea that i built a debt of gratitude because i felt like it was the introduction of that in a really crucial time in my life that made a lot of difference in the life i was living. Host what was your role in the 82nd airborne . Guest i was a paratrooper and in my final role i was director of Information Operation for the first brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division paid that was a long way of saying everything we had in the information ops and that we had within our entire area of operations which was what they call rc east which is regional command in the Eastern Region of afghanistan and where pakistan and Afghanistan Border each other. I was the director of information on that. At the time when i was my last assignment we had about 1700 paratroopers under our command that we were responsible for so it was an amazing and aweinspiring experience. Host wes moore, how have you changed after that first year in military school as a 12 yearold . Guest yeah, 13 years old. I would say that the thing that changed for me was there was this introduction of leadership and what thatro means and what t meant and the role it played in my life where i felt like military school gave me m a chae to get away a bit of the remake of identity that was important and there was a chance to rethink my role in my space and i think the other things happening there was this very intentional introduction of leadership that matters and sometimes when people say about military school they say that they need discipline and they will do pushups and wake up early in the reality is you will do pushups ando you will wake p early and those things are true but that is not what made the experience useful for me. The thing that made the experience useful for me was this introduction to leadership and it was this idea that they are very much going to introduce you to leadership early in a very deliberate weightt where after you go through the initial basic training or whatever it is they put you in charge of something, relatively earlyom ad relatively small. It is not because that is where it happens but they want you to get a taste. They put you in charge of a hallway and they will say you are in charge of this hallway or in charge of the dumpsters or in charge of whatever and we will congratulate you and if its dirty we will help you and once they notice that they do a good job you will be promoted and then you go on to the next thing eand maybe then youll have a couple soldiers under your command and then you move up and so this is gradually extends response ability about the way they try to teach leadership frameworks and i think not only is it useful and important for me but also something that gave me a taste about what was actually so i knew going in that leading people was important to me and i knew that it wasnt a case of leading debts or soldiers or i think about the work they are doing now and being able to be a part of that process and being able to be a person who can help shape the direction of organizations and execute on things and that is something that became important and frameworks in the introduction of the necessity in my life that the public military help to foster. Host wes moore how did you become a Rhodes Scholar . Guest truth is that i think about that experience quite a bit because the first time i had a real conversation about the Rhodes Scholarship was actually when i was interning with the mayor of baltimore and the mayor of baltimore was known what a former Rhodes Scholar and he was the last day of my internship and called me into his office and said i have a picture up there because it sits on my in that picture he standing there and pointing towards a picture on his wall and he was not the type of guy that camera people were flocking around him all the time. That is not what he did but on that day on the final day of my internship he called me and said have you h thought about the Rhodes Scholarship and i told himm i had heard about it but hd not thought about it and in thes picture he took is now in my office and it is him pointing to a wall in the thing hes pointing at is his rhodes class and where he was in the picture. That was the moment we first first told me about the Rhodes Scholarship and said i should give me instructions i on people to talk to about it and i did just that. I went to talk to certain people and certain things that would help me with my essays and tell me hownd to press my lifes journey into a thousand words for the scholarship education and then i loved that story because right there in my office is a picture of known what and i am very clear that that picture would never have happened if that picture did not happen. It was an experience that i will never forget,t in one way our plane flew off less than two weeks after 911 where you know the nation and the world had just changed immeasurably and at the same time i was having this experience and it was shaped very much by 911. Especially at that point i was a military officer and it was a Study International relations in a place where i was one of only a few americans studying. You get a chance to truly Study International operations with people from brazil and china and argentina and getting a chance to understand them how all these dynamics they play amongst remarkable people and they become so my best friends. It was a pretty special training and i thanks to [inaudible] and many others who helped that pass for me and to realize [inaudible] host what is your view about taking money from the Cecil Rhodes Foundation and what did you tell the overview board . Guest one of the last questions that last question they asked me in the interview was have i spent time in south africa and im also africanamerican and i know my history in this country really well. One of the last reasons i was asked is by the person of the chairman of the board and he said you been to south africa and your africanamerican and how can you accept a piece of the rhodes money knowing the history and knowing how he made it and knowing the lives that were lost in order for him to make that. I thought about it and paused and said i know a few things for sure. One was that when cecil rhodes was creating the scholarship he did not have me in mind to be sitting here as a finalist or scholarship money. Hes probably probably turningis in his grave repeatedly knowing that i am here as a finalist for the scholarship. The other thing and that does show me what progress means and progress looks like. The fact that something would not have all intended for me that i have an opportunity to, not only stand here and utilize bit but also have a real obligation to make sure youre doing something with it. The other thing i do know is that it was my ancestors who fought and who bled and who built and who were able to build in a way that created a pathway for me to be in that seat at that moment and who were able to sacrifice and to dream for a world that they didnt see but could dream and fight for one that hopefully one day i would see. For me to have that opportunity and to be there in that seat and for me to have an opportunity to then take the privilege of that and go out as the rhodes trust says go out and fight the world i felt it would be disrespectful to them, and so, understanding that particularly whenlo you lok at the history of the roads and looking at its not even just south africa withso the entire Southern African region and the damage that he did to the people there. For his own personal benefit to the point that at that time he was the wealthiest man in the world. It is also not lost on me the obligation i now have two use the benefit that were fought long and hard for me to have been to use that now to make sure that we can create a more just and more fair world. Host wes moore, where did you grow up . Guest i spent a part of my childhood growing up in maryland and part in the bronx. You know, i called two places home. One is baltimore in one where i live now i was born a little from baltimore closer to the dc area and the new york ray spent a lot of my childhood after my dad died. My dad was a radio personality in baltimore in the dc area. One day he was complaining about his throat and said his throat was bothering him to the point he went to the hospital the next day and as he went to the hospital he was wearing raggedy close and had uneven beard and a lot of assumptions were made about my dad when he walked into the hospital that dayd looking for help. When my mom finally admitted to the hospital to join him they asked her questions like is your husband prone to exaggeration and they gave him instructions to go home and rest and if it got worse then to come back. Five hours after they released him, he died. , that is when we are living in maryland and my mother had a difficult time with the transition at that point and finally caught up her parents, my grandparents, who are living in the bronx. My grandfather was a minister in the south bronx and my grandmother was a schoolteacher in the south bronx. Their house was barely big enough for them but they figured out a way to make a big enough for all of us. We ended up moving up there and then at that point after moving up there that is where i spent a good six, seven years of my childhood before i ended up going through military school in pennsylvania. A lot of my childhood was a lot of moving around but the thing i knew is that no matter where we moved around to i had remarkable love of family who i was lucky to say that they really try to provide for us as best as they could and i know something i always felt coming up. Host from your first book, the other wes moore, my father was dead five hours after having been released from the hospital the simple instructionsea to get some sleep. Same hospital was now preparing to send his body to the morgue. My father had entered the hospital in peaking health but his face was unshaven, his close disheveled, his name unfamiliar and not in an affluent area. Hospital looked at him askance and asked him are diskless questions and basically told him to fend for himself. Now mylf mother had to plan his funeral. Why do think those assumptions were made . Guest race. I think its really one of the heart breaking things. I think about it a lot both with where we are now and also where people say at what point in your life did you know or did you understand the impact of race in the world and as you just listed out it was as early as the earliest point that peter were people werere treated different. When i think about the many systems that we have in place of our society whether its our Healthcare System or whether it was about Environmental Justice and its impossible to talk about these things without understanding the roles and impossible to understand these ideas that the systemic racism and because it is not lost to me and will never be lost to me the fact that had those factors been different that had been mentioned before there would have been a benefit of a doubt that was given and had a benefit of a doubt been given we would not have had the same type of result and this is something i know is not just anecdotal. There is data that reinforces the fact that race is one of the most predictable indicators for like outcomes across education and across the Maternal Mortality in aggressive mental and physical health and so the thing that made that real in my case in the case of my father and in the case of thinking about my Family History is this idea that i know it is inescapable to understand or inescapable to not understand and embrace the impact of race has on all of us. Host who was the other wes moore . Guest the other wes moore is a young man who i heard about actually the same time i was getting ready to head off to england and as the baltimore sun, which is my hometown paper would write an article about this local kid who had just received this Rhodes Scholarship and they were writing about my background and about my childhood in writing about the fact that just ten years ago i had handcuffs to my wrist in that house ten years later i was getting ready to sail to england on a full scholarship and what that ernie was like in that time. But around the same time they were also writing about an armed Jewelry Store robbery. The robbery was a botched robbery where four guys went into a Jewelry Store and one of the first two guys went ten they had guns andbo got everybody on the ground and in the next two guys walkex into the jewelry sth and when they walked in they pulled out mallets and one guy with a gun and one guy with the mallet went to the right and the other with a gun and amount went to the left and the mallets walked around to smash around jewelry cases. They took out watches and rings and necklaces. They got about 400,000 worth that day and one of them yelled lets go at all four ran out of the store to the adjacent parking lot. One of the peoplens in the store that day was an Police Officer who was moonlighting as a security guard. He was a 13 year veteran from the Baltimore Police force and a threetime recipient of the Police Officer of the year and was also a father of five who just had triplets. The reason he worked the day was because it was his day off from the police force and took on the second job to make extra money for his family. When he ended up or when he left the store he got up off the ground and drew his weapon and ran outside to see if he could stop the guys and when he ran outside he started kneeling next to cars and vehicles to give himself color but he didnt realize one of the vehicles he was kneeling next to was one of the vehicles the guys were in. Window rolled down and he was shot three times at point blank range and killed instantly. There ended up being a National Manhunt for those four guys and in 12 days all four guys were caught in one of the people the police were looking for that have been captured and tried and sentenced for theie crime was a guy whose name was also wes moore. The more i learned about this crime, the more i learned about the tragedy and oftentimes in newspaper articles the more i knew there were questions i wanted to ask. One day i just decided to write him a note in the first note i wrote him was like hey wes, my name is wes and here is how i heard of you and i wrote to the Correctional Institution where i knew he was and still is to this day. About one month later i got a letter back from wes moore and that one letter was fascinating to me. Everything he alluded to, all his answers and then that one letter turn to dozens of letters and it turned to dozens of visits and i am now known wes for over 17 years and he is now in your 20 ofis his life senten. Him, his older brother and two other guys who are there there the day of the crime. That is who he was and that initial letter really turned into something that changed the way i thought about the world. It really did help to serve as a important reminder of how thin that line is between our life in someone elses life. That would mean the chilling truth is that his story could have been mine and in tragedy my story could have been his. And how thin those differences are and how thin that decisionmaking is and how sometimes it is about the small decisions that we make that the sometimes we fall into and sometimes its a decision made for us and sometimes its the lack of options that we have that we make and how as a society we cannot be so quick to congratulate or castigate unless we are willing to hear their stories unless we are willing to understand the things that make our storiesnd rich and that make them real. And how to understand that the neighborhoods that we are growing up in and the fact that far too many of our children we are screaming to them about what we want from them and what we exp