Five Days by Wes Moore is a revolutionary book that details the events that took place for five days following the death of Freddy Gray. In April 2015, Gray was arrested for the illegal possession of a knife. He was aggressively placed in a police vehicle. By the end of that drive, he was pronounced to be in an irreversible coma. In the five days that followed his death, massive uprisings and riots caught the attention of the entire country. Moore, being a Baltimore native, attended Gray’s funeral and got to experience the level of people that came together to mourn this unexplainable tragedy.
The book follows several characters from the City during those five days. The author uses these characters from different races, backgrounds, and classes to explore the many structures and systems that makeup society. Through this, Moore achieves to offer unfettered access to the real workings of life in America. The characters include a black police commander, a lawyer, a councilman, a public defender, and protestors.
Moore provides a multifaceted view of a time in history that many haven’t been enlightened to. He highlights the effects' poverty has had on the African-American community and it’s ever reproducing capabilities. Gray was born into institutionalized and inevitable poverty. Regardless of which path he took in life, the system would always be against him. Five Days offers the possibilities of what could’ve been, had Gray not been born into poverty or an unfavorable system. Moore recognizes poverty as the root cause of the rippling damage in Black communities.
