The first full day of autumn felt like midsummer in West Baltimore, and Ben Jealous was sweating with his blazer off. Jealous is running for governor, and he had stopped in for a quick campaign hit at a block party just outside the McCulloh Homes housing project. (Aficionados of The Wire will recognize this location as the site of D’Angelo Barksdale’s drug business.) A large, cheerfully intense man in his mid-forties, Jealous seemed happy to be doing a little grassroots gripping and greeting. Volunteers from Communities United, the local social justice group that had organized the event, had set up a table. A name and address for their mailing list got you a bright purple T-shirt emblazoned with the group’s slogan: ENGAGE EDUCATE EMPOWER. In the shade of a few trees, someone had a barbecue going, smoke spiraling up through the branches, and everyone crowded around for some food and to keep a polite distance from Jealous, who has the kind of charisma that can draw people to him even while he’s perched awkwardly in a folding chair and mopping his brow. A young mother, seated with her child in the stroller next to her, had Jealous cornered, speaking quietly to him about the lack of recreation centers for children in the neighborhood. Jealous listened intently, displaying the politician’s gift for conveying his total attention to anyone with whom he speaks.

Jealous spends a lot of time in this part of Baltimore. In May, he declared his candidacy at Baltimore Blossoms Studio, a nearby flower shop owned by a woman named Rachelle Bland. The location was purposeful—Bland is Jealous’s second cousin—but not just because of the family connection. Baltimore Blossoms is located on an economically depressed commercial corridor that hosts a string of unassuming businesses that most anyone who grew up in a black neighborhood in America would recognize: There’s a deli serving every wonderful fried thing, a barbershop, a hair salon. But beneath the comforting community landmarks lies a palpable sense that justice needs to be done and soon. The shop is a short drive from Mondawmin Mall, the place where the 2015 Baltimore uprising, sparked by the police killing of Freddie Gray, began. Jealous looks here for his constituency. These are the people he wants to connect with and to represent, not just those in the whiter, wealthier suburbs that typically get to choose our leaders.

“My grandmother was a social worker in Baltimore for 30 years. My grandfather was a probation officer at city courts for almost 30 years,” Jealous told me. “They raised me with the understanding that the only way that communities in Maryland get stronger, and problems are solved, is if the governor wants it to happen.” He smiled. “In our state, who the governor is matters.”

Jealous grew up in northern California, the son of a white man from Maine and a black woman who grew up in the McCulloh Homes. Bland and Jealous go way back: He spent his summers in Baltimore with his grandparents. He got an early start in politics, at age 14, working as a precinct captain for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. He was a standout student, going to college at Columbia, where he was suspended for a semester for his part in a December 1992 protest over the university’s plan to tear down Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, the site of Malcolm X’s assassination. The suspension brought Jealous his first taste of national attention. “When you’re the first students suspended from Columbia University in two decades, people take notice,” he said in a 2009 interview with Columbia College Today. “Even when they’re sure all you really know how to do is organize campus protests and get kicked out, they offer you jobs.”

Jealous rose to national attention in his twenties, leading a student protest at Columbia University . Ian Martin

He stayed away from Columbia for two years, working in Mississippi as an investigative journalist for the Jackson Advocate, finally graduating in 1996 and then moving on to Oxford after winning a Rhodes scholarship. When he returned home, Jealous served as the executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of more than 150 African American community publications. At age 29, he became the founding director of Amnesty International’s U.S. Human Rights Program, with a focus on incarceration and racial profilinsg. The same month he turned 32, he moved to the Rosenberg Foundation, a San Francisco group financing social justice projects.