Wes Moore Would Like to Make History

Wes Moore, who is currently America’s lone Black governor, works from a creaky-floored second-story office in the Maryland State House. The building—Georgian brick, shaded by giant trees, in the quiet center of Annapolis—is a small icon of American history. It is the only statehouse to have served as the nation’s capitol. (The Continental Congress, meeting there in 1784, ratified the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and established the United States.) The building holds bronze statues of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, who were born, and enslaved, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Moore can seem surprised to find himself in the governor’s office, though the swerving path of his life has been a defining feature of his rise. He spent his early childhood in Takoma Park, a suburb of Washington, D.C. His great-grandfather emigrated from Jamaica, in the nineteen-twenties, but went back after he was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan; his son, Moore’s grandfather, returned to the United States. When Moore was three, his father died of an illness, and his mother, a freelance writer, moved with her three children to live with her parents in the Bronx. She enrolled Moore at Riverdale Country School, an exclusive private school, but as a teen-ager he had a run-in with police, and, after more trouble, he was threatened with suspension; his mother sent him off to Valley Forge Military Academy and College. He thrived there, joined the Army, and enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 2001. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and worked at Deutsche Bank in London, before he rejoined the Army, as a captain, and deployed to Afghanistan, with the 82nd Airborne. In 2010, after a stint in investment banking, he became a minor celebrity for his book “The Other Wes Moore,” a best-seller about the divergent path of his life and that of a man with the same name, who went to prison. Eventually, Moore switched to nonprofit work, and, in 2017, he became the C.E.O. of the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty group based in New York.

Over the years, his story has attracted journalists and political prospectors. Oprah Winfrey became a friend; he met Barack Obama in the White House. But when Moore entered the Maryland governor’s race, in 2021, having never run for office, he faced a broad field of competitors, including Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, who was endorsed by the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. Initially, Moore was polling at one per cent. During the campaign, he was accused of having hyped the trials of his youth; in his book, though he never claimed to have been born in Baltimore, he described the two Wes Moores as plying “the same streets,” and he did not correct some interviewers who assumed that he had grown up in the city’s gritty sections. There were other efforts to challenge his candidacy: in an ugly episode, a prominent donor to one of his rivals circulated an e-mail arguing that Maryland voters would not elect a Black governor: “Three African-American males have run statewide for Governor and have lost. . . . This is a fact we must not ignore.” But Moore drew crucial endorsements from the teachers’ union and prominent Democratic officials, and attracted a fortune in donations, thanks in part to Winfrey, who appeared in advertisements and at a virtual fund-raiser. He narrowly won the primary and went on to trounce a far-right Republican, Dan Cox, who had hired buses to take people to Washington, D.C., for protests at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Moore would be Maryland’s first Black governor—and, instantly, a subject of prognostication about his potential for higher office.

On the morning of his inauguration, this past January, Moore arranged a ceremony a few hundred yards from the statehouse, at the Annapolis dock that once served as a receiving point for slave ships. To Moore, history is a complex partner in his politics; he often says that he didn’t run simply to make history, but he embraces the power of his breakthrough, and he has tried to convert that momentum into legislative progress against inequalities in education, employment, and wealth. In a recent speech at Morehouse College, he described Maryland as “the proving grounds of redlining and other discriminatory and predatory housing policies that have served as one of the greatest wealth thefts in our nation’s history.” Drawing on his experience in the military, he has also conceived of a civilian program for young people who seek a project larger than themselves. In his first year in office, he created a voluntary year of service for high-school graduates, which is in the spirit of AmeriCorps and which he hopes to make available to every student in Maryland. Signing the bill, he described service as a source of “civic bonds” that can keep people from “retreating to our corners of political ideology.”

At forty-four, Moore is bald but boyish, and is built like a wide receiver, the position he played at Johns Hopkins. On camera, he can project relentless charm, but, in person, when he settles down, he is blunt and succinct. In February, Time wrote, “The Maryland governor may be the Democrats’ most talented newcomer since Barack Obama.” When I visited Moore recently—to talk about service and greed, unity and polarization—the walls of his office were still sparsely decorated, except for some notable historic items, and we started there. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you help me get a feel for where we are right now? Has this always been the governor’s office?

This has always been the governor’s office. And, at four months, we’re still getting things on the walls. But maybe my favorite thing on the wall that I didn’t bring is that. [He points to a case holding an old document.] That’s George Washington’s handwritten resignation of his commission [as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army]. Downstairs, inside the rotunda, is where George Washington, for the first time in the history of the country, willingly gave up power and said, “The power is not mine. The power belongs to the people. And I don’t get to choose who leads. The people do.” And it really did set the foundation for every election we’ve ever had since. It is the foundation of democracy.

Consent, ultimately. The willingness to lose.

And your willingness to accept the results shouldn’t depend on the results. And so I love that document up there, both because I found myself running against an election denier and [because] it just shows how tenuous democracy is. We’re not that far today from fundamental political questions: What is democracy? And what results do we accept and what don’t we? [Moore points to another item on the wall, the photo of his swearing-in.] And then, right there, is when I was being sworn in as the sixty-third governor. Look at that dynamic, that arc.

You started that day at the city dock?

It was very intentional. It’s partly a tribute to Alex Haley and to “Roots,” because his family traced back to Annapolis. So I said, “I want to start the day there.” And so myself, the lieutenant governor, and a couple hundred people all met down at the dock, and we had a moment of silence. Then we basically marched from the docks up to the statehouse, which is a short march in terms of geography, but we really wanted to highlight the power of the journey. The statehouse was built by enslaved people. So now I was about to get sworn in as the sixty-third governor of a state, literally in front of a building that was built by the hands of those who were enslaved.