You are the embodiment of the hopes and the dreams of those who sacrificed before you.
You are the living proof that while progress is not promised it is possible.
My first time voting was this year ,and I voted for Governor-Elect Wes Moore.
He's just a good
person to have in our corner.
Wes Moore is
Maryland's first ever Black governor and only the third Black governor elected in any U.S .state.
As he makes U.S history, he's aware of how his personal history has influenced his trajectory.
I'm a product of a grandfather who loved this country more than anyone I've ever met in my life.
While he was born in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan ran him out.
His father, my great-grandfather,
was a minister and they ran him out because he was a vocal minister
and eventually started getting death threats
and they picked up everything to move in the middle of night, moved back to Jamaica.
Most of my family pledged to never come back to this country
and my grandfather did because he said he was born here and he said I deserve to be here.
No one can run me out.
He came back here.
He became a minister just like his father.
I think he realized this is my fight.
That's why I have to stay and that's why I have to keep pushing.
At the age of three, Moore lost his father to a preventable illness.
A few years later, his mother moved their family
from Maryland to live with his grandparents in New York City.
When he later started struggling in school and getting in trouble outside of it,
his mother sent him to a military academy.
I think the hardest thing that I've ever done I did when I was 13 years old.
That was when I got sent to military school.
It was your first time that you actually had to do everything on your own.
That was the first time that I felt like I earned this and I love that feeling.
Wes Moore has since held many titles: Rhodes Scholar, Army Captain, White House fellow,
investment banker, non-profit CEO and best-selling memoirist.
You don't realize oftentimes the the things that you do and things you experience,
how it really has prepared you and toughens you up.
His varied resume has helped him politically,
as we saw when we accompanied him in the weeks before his inauguration,
from delivering the commencement speech at Morgan State University,
a historically black college in Baltimore
to meeting with veterans on the state's Eastern Shore.
We started off with the lowest name recognition in this entire field,
and that meant going out and talking to more people.
Congratulations. Yes sir.
It meant being able to go out there and just out and work.
Good to see you. Good to be here.
I'm thankful that I'm in a room full of patriots and people who understand what that word means,
people who understand that patriotism is not waving a flag around.
To understand this country
is to understand its history and not just to be selective about its history.
I can literally be the grandson of a man that the Ku Klux Klan ran out
and also in the same breath be a person who's nine
days away from becoming the first Black governor in the history of the state.
Both of those things two things are true, and we can't look at one without understanding the other.
I walk through life with an understanding of its inequities and its histories,
but I also walk through life with a hope of the promise
that this country has offered to some that we want to make sure that it offers to all.
That was the foundation that this country was built on.
This journey has never been about making history.
It's about marching forward.
Today is not an indictment of the past.
Today is a celebration of our collective future.
I know this idea of what it means to fight for one another is going to be the key for our success.
I think we continue to be sold this idea that life is binary.
I think we continue to be given false choices.
We can be more competitive and believe in economic growth
and at the same time say that the economy needs to work for
everybody and not just the people who are privileged and who've written the rules.
I think that both those two things can exist in the same sentence.
These false choices continue to be given to us as a way of dividing us,
as a way of asking us which tribe we belong to and then asking people to
forfeit and go into their own corners and so therefore nothing gets done.
And when I think about the challenges that the state of Maryland is facing
and people say well who do you think you need in
order to fix those things and get those things done,
my answer is simple: everybody, everybody.
In his first days in office,
Moore released a state budget proposal that would raise the minimum wage,
increase tax credits for immigrants and child care and boost education and transportation spending,
all without raising taxes.
The budget, which is subject to legislative approval, also would fund Moore's signature plan,
a voluntary service year available to every high school graduate.
When my family found out he was going to be our commencement speaker,
they said that's going to be our next president.
That's going to be our next president, and I truly do believe that.
And while your last exams might have been taken,
your papers might have been written, and all that stuff might have been done,
let's be clear : your work is just starting,and we need you to win.
That Legacy will reflect how well you truly understood the assignment.