When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an “illegal knife”
in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence
later confirmed, treated “roughly” as police loaded him into a
vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma
from which he would never recover.
In the wake of a
long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like the
final straw—it led to a week of protests, then five days described
alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge
and caught the nation’s attention.
Wes Moore is a
Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, former
White House fellow, and CEO of Robin Hood, one of the largest
anti-poverty nonprofits in the nation. While attending Gray’s
funeral, he saw every stratum of the city come together: grieving
mothers, members of the city’s wealthy elite, activists, and the
long-suffering citizens of Baltimore—all looking to comfort one
another, but also looking for answers. He knew that when they left
the church, these factions would spread out to their own corners, but
that the answers they were all looking for could be found only in the
city as a whole.
Moore—along with
journalist Erica Green—tells the story of the Baltimore uprising
both through his own observations and through the eyes of other
Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore
Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who’s drawn
into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young
black woman who’d spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her
own brother by police; and John Angelos, scion of the city’s most
powerful family and executive vice president of the Baltimore
Orioles, who had to make choices of conscience he’d never before
confronted.
Each shifting point
of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of one of
the most consequential moments in our recent history, which is also
an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and
the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath.