♪♪

♪♪ it's great to be at the apollo. i grew up coming to this place so many times, and this tonight is special. i thought about when i was coming in backstage. i've been on this stage with the godfather of soul, james brown, who was like a father, and michael jackson. the list goes on. but tonight you're going to have something that is special at the apollo because you're going to have two icons that are going to talk about their work and talk about what they do in this

country that is so needed at this time. it couldn't be a better night at the apollo. this is not just a great show tonight. this is history. [ applause ] so, it is my honor and my pleasure that i can't tonight bring you the godfather of soul, but i bring you the godmother of woke, rachel maddow. [ cheers and applause ] i got you on that one. >> thank you so much. [ cheers and applause ]

>> wow. >> rachel! we love you, rachel! >> i am so nervous! fantastic. fantastic. thank you all so much for being here. it is such an honor to be here at the apollo and for this event. all right. so, it was early january. the country was supposed to be preparing for a peaceful transfer of power in washington. the elections had happened in november, and so in january, everybody was due to be sworn in. the new leadership should be taking over. but that early january, there was a problem. and there had been rumbling about it. people had been a little bit worried about it.

but as we got closer and closer to the day on which power was supposed to transfer, it really looked like the peaceful transfer of power was not going to happen. and this was the front page of "the new york times." "senate snarled." senate is unfilled. senate is blocked. southerners prevent organization. extended debate begun. there's supposed to be a united states senate being seated, but it's not happening. they can't convene. this happened in january, 1947. and the problem they were having is that there was a single senator who was a problem. and the problem they were having is that most members of the united states senate did not believe that he should be seated among them. and if he was going to be blocked from taking his seat,

segregationist senators were so outraged by that that they decided they would block there from being any senate at all. they would filibuster the convening of the senate. there would be no u.s. senate anymore, not unless their guy got in. now, the man in question is somebody who you are introduced to in the first chapter of joy ann reid's new book, which is called "medger and murley." in chapter one, joy introduces all of us to this particular senator because among other things, he was medger murlly. i say it is nuts and i'm now going to prove it. while joy has brought you an introduction to that senator in her book, i have brought you tonight the worst present in the world, which i'm going to give

to her in front of all of you. i'm going to bring tape of that senator appearing on "meet the press" in the middle of that scandal. and i will warn you that it is terrible, it is, i think, inarguably obscene. but it should give you some sense as to what the exact problem was with this senator. here it is. >> senator, are you or have you ever been a member of the ku klux klan? >> i have. >> do you think -- >> i am a member of ku klux klan number 40 called bilbao, bilbao clan number 40. >> do you think you'd get any klan support now, sir? >> i do. >> you never lost the klan then, in effect? >> no man can leave the klan. once a clue ku cluks.

>> what did you say to approximate that? >> i said the best time to keep a [ bleep ] away from a white democratic primary in mississippi is to see him the night before. >> what did you mean about that? to intimidate him? >> i did not, sir. >> mr. andrews and senator and all of the group in the balance of this program, we'll have to ask you not to refer to any race, group, or individual in any derogatory term. >> very well. >> very well. i will note for the record that none of the reporters were using this language. it was the sitting senator. in fact, even after being admonished like that, he went on to use the n-word 12 more times in that live broadcast on "meet the press." so, there had been a supreme court ruling in 1944 that said you couldn't have whites only primaries. but when that senator was up for re-election in mississippi two years later in 1946, he openly and repeatedly told audiences in

mississippi that they needed to do everything in their power, they needed to be willing to shed blood to prevent any black person from voting in mississippi's primary elections. and this was not something he did once and then got confronted with it. this is not something that he hid. he said this at every campaign event. he was proud of it. he was proud to admit it even on "meet the press." and the only reason it ended up causing him any trouble at all, the only reason it would ultimately maybe cost him his senate season, the only reason it would stop the whole senate from being convened at all in january 1947, the whole problem with it only arose for him because of his constituents who were black world war ii veterans, including medger evers. black u.s. military veterans returning home at the end of

world war ii, including 20-year-old medger evers and his older brother, charles. they insisted in that 1946 election that they would not only register to vote, they would vote. they had fought for their country. they knew what the supreme court had ruled. they knew the supreme court said they could vote even if this guy bilbo said they couldn't. and what resulted was incredibly violent. joy writes about it in her book. there were about 1,500 black mississippians who braved beatings and armed mobs to cast a vote in that 1946 mississippi primary. but there were more than half a million black mississippians who were eligible to cast a vote. only 1,500 were able to. and even that number was such a scandal, it was such a challenge, it ended upbringing washington to its knees because black veterans petitioned the senate about the violence that confronted them when they tried to vote. they petitioned the senate

specifically about senator bilbo having called for that violence, having demanded that violence. and the senate held hearings about it in washington, d.c., and they held hearings about it in mississippi. they held field hearings. 96 mississippi voters, black mississippi voters, did the bravest thing imaginable and testified at those hearings about the intimidation and the violence that was brought against them to stop them from voting that year. and the point of the petition was that the senate should void his election and not seat him in the united states senate. and they assigned segregationist senators to hear the -- to be on the panel to hear that system, to hold those hearings. and the segregationist senators decided, well, they weren't going to prevent bilbo from being seated on this basis of this. but it did get a lot of national

attention. it became a national scandal. and the scandal was an embarrassment, and the senator bilbo was an embarrassment to the united states senate. ultimately they decided we may not keep him out of here inciting murderous mobs against black voters, but instead we'll get him for his wild ass corruption. he took bribes, up to and including, as joy describes in the book, a new cadillac, a new swimming pool, the excavation of a lake to create an island for his home. they even built him his own private road. it was all bribery. and the senate at least decided they would get him for that. but the whole reason that it happened is because black veterans held this man up for the country to see who he was. and what the country saw was repulsive. and in the end, january 1947, it's the first midterm election after the end of world war ii, the senate is only able to

convene -- we only have a congress at all because bilbo agreed that he would not try to be seated. he would instead go home to mississippi and get medical treatment that he needed. and they would just handle the whole issue of his moral terp tuesday and his corruption when he came back to washington, whereupon senator bilbo finally found it in himself to do the honorable thing for once in his life. he finally had the decency to go home and die. and he never came back to the united states senate. he never came back to washington. so, they never had to vote on whether or not to seat him. and that's how we got our senate back. and today, it is -- you know, theodore bilbo has been lost to history. he doesn't loom in our history anymore. today who looms in our history

is medger evers. medger evers' strategic mind and his bravery are a story of heroism and bravery that echos through generations. we remember him for his work as the field secretary, mississippi field secretary of the naacp. we remember him for his martyrdom, his assassination. we should also remember him for what happened the moment he came back from world war ii. he was on a bus coming home to mississippi. he had been discharged by the army. he was being sent home. on the bus home from his army service in europe fighting against the nazis, he was beaten. he was set upon and beaten. he said he was beaten to within an inch of his life. he said it was the worst beating of his life because he refused to move to the back of that bus when he was ordered to do so. he was wearing his u.s. army uniform at the time he received that beating. as a new veteran registering to

vote, trying to vote, standing up against bilbo's terroristic claim to that senate seat, joy writes that that very early fight in mississippi branded both medger evers and his older brother, charles, as young men to watch, as agitators. the year after that fight, medger evers started college at alcorn a&m. he was soon to be followed by a young woman, louise beasley, who laid eyes on him the first day of school and never stopped looking at him again. they fell for each other the first moment they saw each other. they married within a year. they were fiercely in love until he was assassinated in 1963 and beyond. and that love story, including the beyond, is rendered here in this new book by my beloved friend, joy.

and so i will just say this one last thing. even if history is not your thing, even if it is not what moves you the way it moves dorks like me and joy, this story of medger evers is history, but it is also a love story. and it is also a parable and a paragon of bravery that can teach us how to live now. if you can read the life story of americans who lived through what they lived through, if you can read these life stories and not feel a fire lit under you to do more yourself, to give more, to risk more, to live in such a way that history will put you on the right side of it, then you need to get yourself checked out because you are not okay. it is one of the great joys in my life that i work somewhere now where i have colleagues who share my obsession with forgotten monsters like theodore bilbo but who can also earn the trust and the friendship of

heroes who are still among us, like mary lee evers williams, to persuade her to share her story, who have the juice and energy and beautiful mind and passionate fans to put the evers story, legacy and love story back in the american pantheon of heroes where it belongs. the only person who can do that is here tonight. please welcome my friend, the great joy ann reid. [ cheers and applause ] ♪♪

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♪♪ we're at the apollo theater. >> i know. >> i mean, this is -- it's like, pinch yourself. the legends that have been on this stage. >> i know. i know. yeah. i can't even think about it. in fact, i'm wearing glasses that mean that i can't see any of you which is on purpose because if i could, i'd die. all right. so, joy, the book has been out about eight weeks now. number one "new york times" best seller.

and i know from experience writing books that you live in the research and you live in the writing and it is a very -- it is a lonely thing and you create this thing and you don't know how it's going to live in the world. so, i just wanted to ask you what you have learned from having this book and this story out in the world for eight weeks now, people reading it, people responding to it, people telling you what it means to them. >> you know, one of the things that i definitely learned -- i'm just so grateful that people responded to this story, you know, because we're history geeks. i would just read a straight up book about the history of mississippi with no love story in it, right? i'm interested in history because i think it is needed. we need to understand where we've come from. but i did the story as a love story for a very particular reason. and the reason is myrlie evers williams because she gives you that when you talk with her. but what i've learned in just talking to people now all across this country about this book is how hungry people actually are

to hear about love and to think about the possibility that love can move things and do things. people care about history. but people also care about and are pleasantly surprised that even in some of the worst moments in our history, people did ordinary things. and i think that is what's most powerful about that story, about this story, is that these were ordinary people who had an ordinary, wonderful life beyond the horror that they were facing. >> i felt like one of the things that you were teaching in this book, and it wasn't explicit, but it was laced through it, was that love is part of human resilience, that there is this repeated -- myrlie goes back and again, over and over again, to this thing that was said to her by medgar, which was painful, which is that i can't not do this. i'm doing this for you.

i'm doing this for the kids. and this is confronting him saying, you need to stop doing this work because me and the kids, we need you more. he said, i'm doing this work out of my love for you. and that is, like, this helix of depth in terms of how hard that is. but i think you're trying to tell us that her love for him was transformative both through her grief and also making her the leader that she became. >> yeah. it was. and the thing about it is, this is -- i think we like to think of -- i think we like to think of the civil rights movement and of this era, the 1940s, the world war ii, post-world war ii era, through rose-colored glasses, the glasses that you really can't see right through. and we assume that everybody black was eager to be in the civil rights movement and that everybody that was a world war ii veteran was heroic and good. none of those things were true. there were people who fought in world war ii heroically in europe and came home and

practiced fascism at home. and there were lots and lots of black people who just wanted to live their lives, go to work, send their kids to school, and just not have to deal day in and day out with racism and not have to fight it. and also they were afraid. and, you know, i think that it's something people don't like to admit. everyone likes to think if you went back in time and you were in that era, you would be on the front lines and you would be medgar evers. the vast majority of people wouldn't. most people were just trying to survive. they were just trying to get through the day and not get lynched and not get humiliated in front of their children. and just getting through that day in its own way was heroic, right? and they were just trying to do that. we both have covered what happened with mr. navalny in russia. the reason that navalny is a powerful story is that it's abnormal to be navalny. it's abnormal to be medgar evers. it's abnormal to be dr. king.

it's normal to be scared. and myrlie was scared. and she was very honest about that. she was a normal person who just wanted to marry her insurance salesman husband. and everything else he did terrified her. and she was honest with him about that. and he was honest with her saying, i get that, but if i don't get this, this state and this country won't be good enough for you and my kids. >> yeah. yeah. and i didn't know -- one of the things that i learned from your book is that in his life, before he was martyred, one of the ways that he was written about in the national black press was as essentially a posterchild for i am not leaving mississippi. he was saying -- she wanted to leave as soon as he was graduated and they were married. and he was saying, listen, i love mississippi. and there's so much that's wrong with mississippi and it is so dangerous, and i will never leave this state. and that was a curiosity, even

in his lifetime, that somebody with the resources, the ability, and the notarity that he had, would choose to stay. but it was a deep form of patriotism and love of his country and love of his state. >> right. and i mean, this was 1958. "ebony" magazine does this profile on him. it's his first ever national press. it's titled "why i love mississippi." and it's a weird thing. and these are northern, black journalists coming to the south and talking with a southern black man, who had gotten out. he went to europe. lots of -- not lots. not most. but there were an appreciable number of black people, black men in particular, who went to europe during the world war ii era and didn't come back because you could live a normal life in france and not be discriminated. they were like later for that. i'm not coming back to this country. but he came back. you have to remember mississippi has that connective tissue to chicago. if you're a black person in chicago, your people are probably from mississippi. there was this $11.50 train that

went back and forth. and a lot of people that got out of mississippi went straight to chicago. indiana, some other places. but chicago has a lot of mississippi folks. emmett till's family had that connective tissue. charles and medgar evers, they went to chicago every summer. they knew what chicago was like. they had been. they had travelled a little bit. they had choices. once he had his middle class job with the naacp, they could have said, stage me somewhere else. with his insurance industry job, he could have gone somewhere else. he was smart enough. he was certainly capable enough to live anywhere else. but we did this background on one of the things my research assistants and i did was rewent all the way back to enslavement of these two families, and evers and myrlie's family. and what you find is that they come in the very beginning from africa to mississippi. so, they're mississippi in their bones, roots, blood, and tears, both of them. and so for him, i think his

attitude was, why should i leave mississippi? if fascists don't like me being equal, maybe they should leave mississippi. >> i love also that you tell the story of him hunting and fishing and being an outdoorsy guy and wanting, in part, to be able to expose his kids to the country. >> there's a quote i love. it's from abraham lincoln. he had this sign with a quote from abraham lincoln that says, i'm driven to my knees knowing that i have nowhere else to go. that's the, sort of, shorthand of it. and i think that's how he felt. he didn't want to live in a concrete jungle. he didn't want to live in a city. he wanted to be in a country where he could hunt and fish and do the things he loved. he loved the fauna, the flora, the things about mississippi that weren't the people. and he just felt that the people needed to do better.

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i'm jessica leighton with the hours top stories. we are getting our first look tonight at the path of destruction in jamaica by hurricane beryl. that storm racing toward mexico right now, leaving damage across the caribbean. officials have confirmed that at least nine people have died, including two in jamaica. hundreds more have been displaced by the storm, which just weakened, we're told, to a category 2 hurricane. overseas, exit polls released in the last hour are

suggesting the ruling conservative party, in power for 14 years, is heading for an historic defeat. and keir starmer will become britain's new prime minister tomorrow. he is a champion of nato and views that align closely with president biden. but he could be at odds with donald trump. if starmer does win, he'll meet king charles tomorrow and walk through the famous black door of downing street as the new leader of the uk. and in washington, the president and first lady hosted active duty military service members for a barbecue at the white house, joined by secretary of defense lloyd austin and his wife. later tonight the first couple, along with vice president kamala harris will host a fourth of july celebration for military and veteran families, care gives and survivors. then tomorrow he heads to wisconsin for a campaign event before a sitdown interview with abc. that is his first since last week's debate.

now back to joy reid and rachel maddow live at the apollo. ♪♪ >> one of the things, joy, you were talking about how the rose-colored glasses, the way that we look back, we all like to think that not only would we be a hero but that everybody who we relate to when we think of that history, they were all probably histories too. one of the things that you spend quite a bit of time repeatingly going back to are african americans in mississippi who were paid by the mississippi sovereignty commission, which was a state organized spy agency to spy on the civil rights movement. and the files in the sovereignty commission will curl your hair. it's unlike anything else in american political history. but there were black leaders, black newspaper owners, newspaper editors. there were black activists who were essentially on the payroll

of the segregationist movement to spy on leaders like medgar evers and others. and you make sure to tell those stories and name them as well. i wanted to ask you about that decision. >> well, because the truth of the matter is that segregation and maintaining it after brown v. board, it required a massive apparatus that in the state of mississippi including that sovereignty commission. it included the white citizens' councils, which was the dressed up version of the klan. these were the people who owned the banks and mortgage companies. there was the violent section, the klan. but it also did require the complicity of some black people who had made the calculation that either for financial reasons or others it was better to play ball. some of them were business owners who liked having a captive audience, to be blunt. in a segregated society, you, as a store owner, you know, black

people had to shop with you. there wasn't anywhere else for them to go. and there were some black newspaper editors who thought the naacp was too radical. they didn't like the way they were speaking about mississippi society, and they felt they were troublemakers and they were hurting the business communities that were all black. and they felt that the status quo could work for them financially. and since they weren't suffering, they didn't see any reason to change it. >> wow. >> and they did take money. and the thing that was so interesting is some of them were exposed at that time, almost in realtime in that era. you know, you discovered that the leading -- not just any newspaper, but the leading black newspaper editor, leading black newspaper in jackson, mississippi, the editor of that newspaper was taking money from the sovereignty commission. leading pastors were taking money. >> so, this gets to the question that, for me, loomed over the whole book for me and i most want to talk to you about tonight, which is a little bit

of inside baseball about how we do our work. so, i hope you don't mind. but it's about good guys and bad guys in history. and at a very fundamental level, this book is making the case that james baldwin was right, that if we are going to take inspiration from civil rights leaders who were martyred, then there is a try yum very rant of medgar -- as american who is stood up and were brave in the face of evil and oppression. but what do we do in our history with the people who are committing the evil and who are perpetrating the oppression? i feel the reason i want to talk to you about this is i feel like you've made really interesting choices about what history to tell in this book. and i am fundamentally divided because part of me is very happy that nobody's heard of theodore bilbo. being lost to history? yeah. good. i'm glad you are.

but part of me wants everybody to know who he was and what he did. and i feel like part of why we seem unprepared and i'll ill eqd to deal with your generation's oppression and tyranny is because we don't know much about the previous oppressors and tyrants of previous generations. so, how do you -- how do you thread -- how do you thread that? i mean, it's a great insult. it's a great curse to tell somebody, you will be forgotten. you will be lost in history. you will have no headstone. on the other hand, maybe that's not the worst thing that can happen to the worst people. >> i agree with you. i am somebody who wants no villains lost to history. and it's -- the reason i say that is that it does sometimes feel like we keep reliving the same eras in american history over and over again.

and the -- and this current era, it does feel like -- and all of you, we already know watch rachel's incredible show. when you're talking about the 1930s and '40s, what it sounds like you're talking about is now. and the only way that you can get people to repeat the same errors is that they don't remember that it happened before, that you think donald trump is some thing that's never existed before. but when you say, no, no, no, no, here's another version of that. if you think, well, this has never happened before, that, you know, you've seen people denied the right to vote or denied access to the ballot. no, no, it's pretty much the same playbook. nothing's new under the sun. people don't change the tactics of evil. they just repeat it because people forget that it happened. and so i am not for amnesia in that sense. so, the theodore bilbo -- we were both -- we were talking in the back because rachel maddow,

i'm fairly sure bugs my house because she's obsessed with everything i'm obsessed with. literally once we both figured out we were obsessed with equatorial guinea. >> we've had tons of arguments. >> when i saw that theodore bilbo showed up in the filing from the state of colorado to try to get donald trump thrown off the ballot, i was so happy that all the people around me thought i was such a weirdo that i think they probably wanted to leave the room. i was like, guys, to my poor, producers, it's theodore bilbo. bilbo is here. they were like, okay. >> is that a noun? >> is that a noun? does it matter? it matters. very quickly. the reason you have to pay attention to theodore bilbo is that what theodore bilbo and others like him were fighting in

a primary. these were the trials of the democratic party, not the republican party. this was the way -- we're talking a lot about the 14th amendment. the 14th amendment and the -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th were meant to enfranchise and create real citizenship for black people. the creative ways that southern states got around it was to say essentially the democratic party, which was the only game in town in the south, the same way the republican party is now. we're not saying that you can't vote because you're black. we're saying you don't meet the rules of our private organization. and we're going to find all these creative ways to make sure you can't vote because the primary is the general. once you win the primary, everyone is going to vote for you in the general. the primary is the power. we have forgotten that in american politics now. americans have forgotten the rights of primaries. the civil rights fight in the south was about getting black people access to the only game in town, the democratic primary. and if you couldn't vote in the primary, it didn't matter what happened after that because

republicans couldn't be elected. now, just reverse that, put the republicans where the democrats were, flip the parties, it's the same playbook. so, i think we've got to remember in order to progress. we can't fight a demon that we beat before but we forgot the formula. >> amen. amen. exactly. can i tell you one more theodore bilbo story? >> yes, please! >> talk amongst yourselves. we have to talk. so, mississippi, i believe, has only ever had two statues of governors in the mississippi state capitol. and one of them is theodore bilbo. and they commissioned -- after he died in 1947, which was a kindness, they commissioned a german sculptor to create a life-sized bust of him, which sounds big, but he was very small. >> yeah, he was small. >> but it's life size, and they put him in the rotunda. and he -- i mean, this is a man,

before he died -- between when they sent him home from washington and when he died, he wrote one book. it was called "your choice: separation or mon gralization." the man was a cartoon villain. separate and apart from the swimming pool and the lake they built for him and all the rest of it. but they've got the statue of him in the rotunda. somebody at some point gets it in their head that maybe let's move it out of the rotunda. they put it in a conference room that nobody uses. they then realize they don't actually have a choice to move him anywhere else because when they commissioned the statue from the german sculptor, they also passed a law that said, this statue of theodore bilbo aever allowed to leave the first floor of the mississippi capitol. who starts using the conference room? the black caucus of the

mississippi legislature who, to their credit, uses him as a coat wrack. it is still a problem he is there. at some point somebody takes it upon themselves to move him to somewhere else on the first floor of the capitol. and they find a storage closet next to the elevator shaft. and they wrap him in asbestos blankets, and they shove him in a storage closet. this only happened in the last two years. 18 months ago they decided, screw the law. we are moving him to the basement. he has only just now been moved to the basement and on to the civil rights museum. that man has a weird persistence. he's an esop fable. and the fact that we -- mississippi is suffering, even just the lead version of him. but learning those stories is an important part of learning how people thought against him.

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governor announced, if they are going to try to extradite you from florida, i will direct state law enforcement to block that extradition. that was governor ron desantis of florida. >> he's done well, hasn't he? >> yeah, he's -- he just turned out great. and that feels fatal to the rule of -- like, defying court orders, right, feels fatal. but we had it before, of course, right? this is what your -- what this story is. with massive resistance to civil rights rulings from the courts in the south, we have had widespread defiance of the rule of law in this country for years and years and years and years, not bad laws, good laws defied in practice. and so while we're thinking about the rule of law and the challenges that we have against it now, what should we have learned from that experience in the civil rights movement that teaches us more about how to combat that threat now? >> right. and this was a core challenge

that medgar evers faced. you have court rulings going to the naacp's way. they're actually winning in court over and over again. and the courts -- all white -- are saying, you have to grant black citizens this right or that right, right to access the bus terminals, right to eat in the restaurant. you have to do it. and you just see this massive creativity, the massive resistance, of finding ways to say, we're going to defy that. defying supreme court orders was the thing back then. and for medgar evers, his frustration was that the naacp's answer to your question was just, we'll go back to court again. we'll go back to court and we'll go another and we'll win again and again and again. the challenge to that was young people in the south and in the state of mississippi. they weren't interested in this strategy because, for them, they didn't have mortgages that could be recalled by some citizens council banker. they didn't have a job they could be let go from.

they were either high school students or college students. and they also have the bravado of youth. so, their answer was, we'll fight it in the streets. we'll march -- right. we will march on the segregationists. we will sit in the library and refuse to leave. we'll get arrested. we'll just use our bodies to resist. we'll show down the progress of this economy and make it impossible for people to live a peaceful, quiet, segregated life. and medgar was siding with them, in defiance of his bosses who were very angry about it. so, he's torn. his actual job is to do what he's told, which is to sign people up, register them to vote, which people are too terrified to do -- adults are too scared -- and sign people up for naacp memberships. people would get fired if they joined the naacp. the kids were saying, no, no, we're going to march. and he was saying, i'm going to bail you out of jail. there was just this sense that the only thing you could do is do your own version of massive resistance, physical resistance

to tyranny. so, that, kind of, was the big question in the south. and dr. king, who medgar evers deeply revered and wanted to replicate the movement and what he did in birmingham and what he did in alabama, he was trying to do that in mississippi. king had the same idea. the only thing you could do when you have people who were defying the supreme court of the united states is to force them to watch the violence that they're willing to perpetrate on television. if you're going to do this to us, we're going to make sure it's heavily publicized. and one of medgar evers big beeves with the way that black americans had reacted to their subjugation was the silence, was the fact that when someone was lynched, they, sort of, just melted into the ground. they were never -- no one talked about it. no one protested about it. no one said anything about it. he said, we need to make sure that whatever is done for us is done publicly. he founded a newspaper to make

sure that happened. i think that king and medgar agreed that the only thing you can do when you get to the point where people are willing to defy the supreme court of the united states and subsequent court orders is if you have to physically resist and you have to physically resist in public so that people have to feel the shame of what they're willing otodo. no, my denture's uncomfortable! dracula, let's fight back against discomfort. with new poligrip power max hold & comfort. it has superior hold plus keeps us comfy all day with it's pressure absording layer. time for a bite! if your mouth could talk it would ask for... poligrip.

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thinking about the way that we've learned history, i feel like the easy way to learn that history is to learn it as if there was a synthesis, there was a legal strategy to get the court rulings and then there was the direct action and they were synthesized and came together working for the same thing. and part of the pain of the story of medgar evers is that was not an easy marriage. he was a american employed by the naacp, which was focusing on the litigation strategy, and he was in sympathy with and deeply involved with and organizing direct action. and at the moment that he was killed was prepared to be getting fired and had been warned that he was going to be fired. and this was itself its own kind of sacrifice and it's own kind of bravery and leadership to be the one bridging the gap between those two very difficult strategies. >> and this is the reason that i say again, it's ordinary people who do these things, right?

so, you have this man who not only is worried about getting fired, whose wife has now had their third child. he's got a 9-year-old, an 8-year-old, and a 3-year-old. she's left her job. she was his secretary. she was working as his secretary when he first got the naacp job. but once they give birth to the third child, she stays home. so, now there's one income. they've got a mortgage. they've got two car payments. they've got bills. he's a former insurance salesman. he could barely afford to pay his insurance premiums. so, he's economically stressed, and his marriage is stressed because myrlie evers is saying to him, you don't have to do this. they don't even want to protect you. they won't pay for security for this house. they won't pay for protection for you. you can barely afford to keep your car fixed up. and if your car breaks down on the road, you're going to get killed by the klan. and every time i pick up the phone, it's either some terrified black person who is trying to ask you to come and

identify a lynching in their family, or it's some angry white person saying they're going to blow this house up and kill me and kill you and kill our kids. so, he's got family stress. so, i just -- you know, i got so invested in this couple and in their just normal lives just thinking, how would you deal with that? and there was a time when myrlie did say to me in one of her interviews, she was surprised he didn't have a heart attack because he was so stressed out. and when you're doing all that and your bosses are all over you saying, i don't agree with what you're doing and you're going to get fired if you don't stop, but you deeply believe in your heart and your soul that this is the only way to liberate your people, i can't imagine being him. i can't imagine having to do that. for her, for myrlie, by the time she really buys in, by the time she says, you know what, i'm going to be down with this, it's the point their home is fire bombed and she's the one at home with the kids.

and she's the one who has to get the garden hose and put it out. and there's a point she says, you know what? what else can we do? what else can we do? he's not going to stop. they're not going to stop. so, i'm not going to stop. [ applause ] >> it's also just the sensitivity and the depth with which you tell how much she knew it was coming and how much he knew it was coming. may 20, 1963, medgar evers is miraculously granted, as you tell the story, granted tv time, equal time to respond to segregationist critics of the movement. he gives a 20-minute speech on television in jackson, mississippi. and you talk about how myrlie knows the racist, segregationist ledger has already printed their address, and now everybody who has a television will see his face. and they know this is the end. and within ten days, their home is fire bomb. and by the middle of june, he's

dead. and for them to know it's coming, for them both to know it's coming, and for him to persist, is a form of heroism, but also a form of tragedy that i honestly don't know how to process now. i mean, you made friends with mrs. evers through this process. i can feel you crying writing that chapter. >> yeah. >> in feeling for her and knowing that she knew it was coming. how did you process it and how did you factor it into your friendship with her? >> well, i cried a lot writing this book. i think the saddest story that i remember writing was the one where -- and you know, she's a 1950s, 1960s housewife. so, she does all the cooking, cleaning, and ironing. context, you know what i mean. where myrlie irons a set of shirts, crisp, white shirts for medgar to go to work that week. and he says, that's so sweet, thank you. i appreciate it, but i don't think i'm going to need them.

and he just -- there's a point in which he starts feeling fatalistic and saying fatalistic things and where they both, kind of, saw where this was going because the naacp had told him when he had -- his neighbor, who was a member of the naacp and his other friends said, you've got to get this guy protection. he's being followed by the klan everywhere. his phone is being tapped. you've got to do something. and they said, we've got better things to do with your money. and, you know, the sense of being abandoned and also threatened with your job, i think at the end he was just exhausted. and the, sort of, end -- the hardest thing to write really was what we knew was coming. but it comes in this really extraordinary moment. he had done the tv speech. he had said things about the kind of world that he wanted to see created in this country. and then president kennedy gives a speech on june 11 that is very similar and that uses some of his words. i remember he had been peppering kennedy with telegrams after

telegram after telegram. i spent a lot of time in the library of congress -- i got my library of congress card, y'all. i'm a supernerd. i was so excited. i took a picture of me with it. >> bury me there. >> please. some of the saddest stuff to read there were the telegrams and the, sort of, increasingly desperate communications between medgar evers and the white house saying, you need to send the national guard here. you need to send -- you guys are sending russian observers. send them here. let the russians come and see what we're doing here. he was increasingly desperate. so, kennedy gives this speech. and in the meeting after the speech, it's supposed to be a triumphant moment because he'd won kennedy over. he'd won this president over who starts using some of his language, a fellow world war ii veteran. he got it. he gets it. but in the meeting afterwards, he's told by his bosses, you will end the street demonstrations immediately.

there will be no more street demonstrations. there will be no more marches. there will be no more public activism. it's over. >> and we're cutting off the bail money. >> and the bail money, we're cutting it off. it's done. so, he leaves this moment when it should have been his most triumphant moment dejected. and that's why he gets killed. this is a veteran. this was a man -- he was not dr. king. he was not about that life. he had guns all through his house. he was not non-violence. he didn't believe in that. he wasn't. he wasn't. but he -- and he had a system that he had developed as a military man even with his kids, doing drills with them. if you hear a gunshot, you go down on the floor, you get your brother, lay on top of them, go in the tub. he taught the kids what to do if there was a shooting or a fire bombing in the house. that night he was so despondent after this kennedy speech that he makes mistakes. he makes fatal errors that are the reasons that this fellow world war ii veteran was able to

kill him. >> you mentioned a couple of times while we've been talking, a variety of economic warfare that i learned a lot about from your book. when we think about the civil rights struggle, i think we all know about the famous black boycotts, obviously the birmingham boycott and the others that received so much attention. i didn't know as much about the jackson movement and the delta and places like that. but there's also this other side of economic warfare, and you've mentioned it a couple of times tonight. banks foreclosing on the homes and businesses of activists. so, in the wake of emmett till trial, the banks and the financial organizations that had made normal home loans, normal car loans, normal personal loans to the black community just like they had to anybody else, targeted activists who had participated in trying to get witnesses to come forward for the emmett till trial. and they foreclosed on their

homes. that is how charles evers ended up moving to chicago. this form of economic warfare was waged against them. and i was thinking about this because in tim schneider's book on tyranny, lesson 14, one of the lessons that he warns about and that he describes is happening in all sorts of authoritarian countries in front of all sorts of different type of tyranny is to not give tyrants the hooks on which to hang you. and he advises -- one of his lessons from the 20th century is, clean up any legal trouble. clean up any financial trouble. clean up anything that anybody can use against you because the nastier -- the phrase he uses is, the nastier rulers will know what they know about you to push you around. and seeing that at work in this story, seeing that at work in mississippi, schneider is warning about that having happened in fascist germany. i wonder if you have been

thinking about that in terms of the future in this country and the ways we need to build up our own reresilience. and high-profile people, such as yourself, need to protect ourselves and make sure we have people not just in solidarity for us but looking out for us. >> absolutely. and to build on your point, think about -- again, none of the playbooks are new. people just roll out the same ones over and over again. think about what's happening in jackson, mississippi now, where jackson, which is an 80% black city, which is the capital of mississippi, has been bereft, has had the control of its own water system seized by the majority white and republican government, and they've attempted to seize their control of their own policing and imposing a capital police system

on them. and there's -- violent policing is -- it's violent like -- it's violent in mississippi like it is almost nowhere else. it's incredibly violent. and they're essentially saying that black people must not be able to govern themselves in jackson, that they cannot be able to govern themselves government to tennessee, very similar. the two states they're targeting trying to steal from them control of their own resources are the cities of memphis and the city of nashville, both of which have black leadership in the state house. the justins, justin jones and justin pearson, right? they are the representatives from memphis and jackson. so, what they're essentially fighting their majority conservative white government for is control of the resources of the city of nashville and the county where nashville is, which is the most prosperous. it's where the money comes from. but they don't want that in control of black people. you're seeing what's happening in states where they're

deconstructing dei to the extent where even there's a lawsuit against howard university to try to not allow howard university to control the influx of black doctors, to demand that they make howard university's medical system no longer majority black. this is a systemic attempt to wage economic warfare on a group of people, particularly in southern states, who have the numbers that if they voted at scale would flip elections. this is not about conservatives or white people not liking black people. and i'll just say very briefly, one of the things that my editor cut down a lot but i still sprinkled it through the book because i had a whole chapter on it, and he's like, no, ma'am. i had a whole chapter, an indepth history of the history of slavery and the post-slavery era in mississippi because

mississippi was the richest state in america when we had slavery because its cotton comes from the richest soil. this soil creates the highest grade cotton on earth. the queen of england loved mississippi cotton. having the mississippi cotton label meant you had the best cotton in the world. they needed a massive labor force. so, after slavery was done, three states, mississippi, louisiana, and south carolina, had majority black populations because they imported so many africans and bred so many africans in their chattel system because they needed a massive labor force. what happens when you then end slavery and reconstruction says that every man -- women couldn't vote -- but that every man could vote? but the majority of your state is black? and in the case of mississippi, it's 55% black. what you get is a successful multiracial democracy because the black and tan republicans, which was a coalition of radical republicans -- which used to

mean something different back then -- and black folks got together and created things like free public schools, access to health care, trying to educate black children who had never gone to school in their lives, actual school that wasn't closed during the period when you were tilling the fields. they would actually close the schools so black kids could work and be child labor. those things changed during reconstruction and changed mississippi for the better, ending that and ending black access to the ballot was about that. it was about reversing reconstruction. and what we're seeing now in the south, where it's the most intense, is it's looking at the places that have large numbers of people of color, texas, arizona, nevada, mississippi, south carolina, north carolina, virginia, florida, which has one of the highest percentage of black people in the country. so, the systemic ways in which they're trying to demoralize

black voters and demoralize lgbtq voters, it's about reducing the percentage of people who will be willing to or able to participate so they can win. that is the way fascist governments thrive. >> and to make it worse, i do feel like we are in, in this election cycle in particular, we are in an era of newly n our lifetime, newly overt, out and loud, electoral racism. and i mean that not like, i'm discerning racism in something you're doing. no. out and loud, proud racist. steve bannon in europe addressing conservatives in europe saying, you will be called racists. wear it as a badge of honor. stephen miller, who is a trump administration official running ads in florida saying that the

only real racism is racism against white people, and what white people need is white racial solidarity and a government that finally works for white people. i mean, they're running -- they ran ads to this effect in florida, and they're now -- they've now written it into policy for what would be the incoming trump administration as part of project 2025. so, i mean -- and you see it in right wing culture too. you see people like elon musk at twitter endorsing psuedoscientific racism, all of this quackery about iq, right, and psuedoscientific racism. that's all newly popular among the tech right wing. this stuff is not subtle and it is not something that you need investigative journalism to figure out. this is out and proud. so, that's an important distinction because it means that exposing it or trying to put a spotlight on it doesn't necessarily work because they

are not ashamed of it. so, what do you do with that? >> and by the way -- i love. no, i mean -- and i mean they weren't then either. one of the things that's so fascinating, if you go back and in the 1950s and watch people being interviewed on the streets, cbs reporters would go up to a random white couple and they were very open saying, we don't want the n-words the in our schools. they weren't ashamed of it then. it wasn't embarrassing. and they saw the power of television as something that could work for them. there's always something with white supremacists that we're right, we're right anyway, so it'll be obvious that we're the morally right people. and it was only when the media started actually realizing there is a villain and a victor here. we can't be neutral or be both sides, the ideas of racism, that

you started to get this idea that the media was biased. that's where that comes from. i think what you do with it is you actually have to speak louder. and i think you also have to explain to people. we both talk a lot about democracy on our shows a lot. but i think somebody said to me at a talk that i did recently, you should explain what that means. and i was like, that's a really good point because it's just a word that we say a lot that i don't think people necessarily know what that means, demos, the people. it means the people get to decide. how are the people deciding when 40% of americans vote in a primary and everyone is stuck -- you know what i mean? and then everyone is stuck with whoever that 40% choose in the general. and then, like, 60% vote in the general. that means that demos didn't decide that. that isn't democracy. we are a very low participatory democracy right now. what we're seeing is a disconnect between people and power, where a small number of

people have gotten good at finding ways to exercise minority rule and power and the majority of people have become demoralized. so, you're seeing very low voter turnout in places like louisiana, in places like florida. i was in broward county, one of the bluest counties in florida and one of the worst turnouts. you get a ron desantis in because they say he won a great victory. well, a million people didn't vote that voted in the previous election. that is subtraction, not addition. and that's not democracy. so, i think that maybe what we do about it is that we have to start, i think, speaking more loudly and i think more specifically about what we mean by defending democracy and not just saying that we should do it.

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♪♪ i have one last question that i want to ask before the i cede the questions to all of you. and that is -- you're talking about demoralization. the other thing that happens, as a democracy is threatened by authoritarian movement, is that politics gets not just boring or demoralizing, but dangerous, that there starts to be violence that's associated with individual candidates and individual political movements where you expect there to be

paramilitary presence at political events. when people who are doing normal political things, whether it be registering to vote or voting -- we saw this in the south, right? this some of the most dramatic elements of the civil rights story. you start to see violence being used to prevent people from doing the very mundane day-to-day work of democracy. so, doing the basic stuff as a citizen becomes an act of bravery. and that leads to heroism, but it also leads to very small numbers of people participating. and we are not in a place right now as a country of 330 million people, where we can count on a few heros to fix this for us. we need mass participation while people are demoralized and people are increasingly afraid. and i have learned so much from you. i want to know what your message is to people watching us right now, people in this theater right now. people are looking to you as somebody who understands this

history and understands these politics better than anyone i know. how do you tell people that it's okay to do it, it's okay to feel afraid, you need to do it anyway, and in fact, you must? >> it's the most important question because the only -- because we -- the system that we have inherited from our very imperfect founding fathers/slave owners is one in which participatory democracy is the only thing that can save us. the courts won't save us. we know that. clarence ain't interested. god love him, as they say -- bless his heart, like they say in the south. he said, i just want to go on trips. and alito is like, i'm going with you. get rich. what i say about it is remember rosebud lee. rosebud lee is somebody that i learned about in doing the research for this book. rosebud lee's husband, the

reverend lee, was registering to vote in a state in which less than 6% of people were registered to vote in the primary. and the way that democrats at that time kept black people from voting was through political violence. and reverend lee was taking, you know, petitions for black folks to simply register to vote. and he was shot dead by a klansman who pulled up beside him in a car, aimed a gun at him, and shot his jaw off. rosebud lee made a decision that was very brave. she said, if you're going to take a muz, we're going to have an open casket funeral. they said they believed it was a car accident so they didn't have to arrest anyone for his killing.

that open casket funeral is where maymy till mow lee got the idea for what she did with emmett till. really brave people take inspiration. they duplicate the brilliant inspiration from others. that's where mamie till got that. the other thing is to remember political violence is what kept black mississippians from voting. it was charles and medgar evers going to register to vote and having 200 white men with guns face them down and threaten to kill them if they tried to register and charles and medgar saying, we've got guns too. and charles saying, maybe it's only two of us and 400 of them, maybe we should go home. that was in the theodore bilbo election. this was theodore bilbo saying, the best way to keep a black person from voting is visiting

the n-word the night before. there was a field hearing in mississippi in which the members of congress tried to understand what had happened in that election. i mean, black people were terrorized out of voting. what i would say now is that we don't face that level of political terror, but the level of terror that you face now is real. and we should acknowledge that it's real. >> yes. >> when you've got proud boys and oath keepers showing up in arizona with long guns, it's intimidating. you know there are mass shootings and you see people with visible weapons at your polling place or outside where you're trying to count votes, where you have ruby freeman and her daughter, shaye moss, threatened with death and kidnapping and all the rest just for being election workers. this is a time that is very much like medgar evers time. we have to ask ourselves, how did people at that time respond to that? what did they do when they were faced with the same things we did? you know what they did? they voted. they voted anyway. and because they understood that, as king said, you may not be able to get the racist

sheriff to stop being racist toward you or change his mind, but you can vote him out. and in the end, i think what people have to remember is that the vote and using the vote is actually the strongest and most powerful tool that you have. and maybe you vote in numbers. maybe you vote absentee so you doe to go and face those gunmen. maybe you get all of your church friends or all of your group chat or all of your friends to organize, you know, a convoy where you can all drive together. you start using your community, using the community that you've built up around you and you find ways to get together and be brave. but not voting ain't the answer. >> yeah. >> it's just -- you're ceding it to the other side. and what they want desperately is for you to not participate and for you to give up. in autocratic societies and societies that are fully gone, there are elections, like in russia, but they aren't real. they don't matter. and when we start to believe elections don't matter, we're on

our way to being them. >> that's exactly right. that's exactly right.

in our family there was a passion for glass making that's passed down through the generations. on ancestry i was able to actually put together our family tree. each person is a glass worker. we stood on some pretty broad shoulders to get to where we are today.

hi. i'm jessica leiton with the hour's top stories. we are getting our first look tonight at the path of destruction in jamaica by hurricane beryl. that storm racing toward mexico right now, leaving damage across the caribbean. officials have confirmed that at least nine people have died,

including two in jamaica. hundreds have been displaced by the storm, which just weakened to a category 2 hurricane. -- in power for 14 years is heading for an historic defeat. and the leader of labor opposition party, keir starmer, will become britain's prime minister tomorrow. if starmer does win, he'll meet king charles tomorrow and walk through the famous black door of downing street as the new leader of the uk. and in washington, the president and first lady hosted active duty service members for a barbecue at the white house. they were joined by secretary of defense lloyd austin and his wife. and tonight the first couple, along with vice president kamala harris, will host a fourth of july celebration for military and veteran families, caregivers, and survivor, where

the president is expected to deliver remarks. tomorrow, president biden will head to wisconsin for a campaign event before a sitdown interview with abc, his first interview since last week's debate. now back to joy reid and rachel maddow. i'm going to take some questions from the audience. we're going to have reverend al sharpton come out and join us again. he's going to fact check everything we just said. rev, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> first of all, did we get anything wrong in that discussion? >> no, i think you got it all right. and i think that -- you know, what this book did -- i almost had to go to therapy because i think what joy did that has not been done as well is bring the human side of what those that fought these fights were. and last year, i went and spoke

for the 60th anniversary of the assassination of medgar, and myrlie evers was there. and i've never told this in public. i told it to her. and you know how regal she is. and she took my arm and said, you ought to say that in public one day. and medgar got killed at 39 years old. a lot of the reason that the 250,000 people showed up in the march on washington in '63 is because medgar had gotten killed, and that energized that march. dr. king got killed at 39. malcolm x got killed at 39. and i was -- i grew up in a movement of much years later, and i started in brooklyn. when i was 12, i became the youth director of jesse jackson when i was 13. john lewis and jesse jackson

told me one night, you don't understand, we're the first generation of leaders that lived past 40. and i don't think people understood until your book brought it -- i really almost -- where people's families lived every day expecting to bury their loved ones. and the human side of it, you told, because it was a family thing. and i think that this was a beautiful book for history. but it also told the story of a woman that every day looked at her kids saying, your dad may not come home. >> joy, question for you. what made you decide to do this book? and did you travel to mississippi as part of your research? >> well, thank you for the question. what made me decide to do the book was myrlie, was ms. myrlie. i interviewed ms. myrlie for my weekend show, "a.m. joy" if

anyone remembers that. i interviewed her. rev will remember that one. she was very different meeting her in person. we flew out. this was 2018. she and maxine waters were together as a panel, represented waters. afterward we got to talking, us girls. and she started talking about medgar. and it was such a profound, personal, and, like, present way. and i said to her, ms. myrlie, you sound like a giggly schoolgirl talking about your boyfriend. she said in her beautiful voice, medgar evers was the love of my life. that's very good. that's how she sounds. >> you got it, you got it. >> that's how she sounds. and when she says that you to, you would be hard pressed not to want to write a whole book about it. and i did travel to jackson, the second part of the question. we spent a lot of time in jackson to do this book. we went on the block where they

lived. they changed the name to margaret walker alexander avenue. ms. margaret alexander lived at the end of the block, was queen of the block. and the next block over is named for medgar evers. we interviewed the neighbors. she showed up to this interview in her hospital bed because she was 90 years young and fresh, and she had on her fabulous red lip and a high heel. but she was fabulous. and we interviewed the next door neighbor. the mom was also very ill. but the daughter who witnessed the aftermath of the assassination was 15 at the time, she and her little sister. we interviewed her. we interviewed best friends down the street. this was a very cohesive block, and they're still there. the evers family gave us tremendous access to their archives. we went in, myself, my two researchers, and my assistant, sean, loves genealogy, and my husband, we were all in there in

these archives. it was incredible. they gave us full access. they let us in when it was closed and we were the only ones in there. we could go through boxes of everything, everything from their high school records to their marriage certificate to letters they had written to all of his communications. we were allowed to photograph it and take it back and sit with it. i really sat with it for, like, a year figuring out, what do i do with all this material? we spent a lot of time in jackson. the cockroach. resilient creatures. true miracles of evolution. where there is one, others aren't far behind. always scavenging for food, the cockroach... well that's horrifying. ortho home defense max indoor insect barrier. one application kills and prevents bugs for 365 days. not in my house you don't. nature is wild. your home doesn't have to be.

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♪♪ this is a question for both of you. what advice do you believe medgar evers would provide for today's youth? >> you want to go first? so, at the time, what medgar evers was telling the youth at the time was, you've got to be smart if you're going to be out there because you're going to get hurt. they're going to hit you with batons. they're going to hit you with fire hoses. they're going to get violent. so, what he actually literally taught them was how to physically defend yourself. so, he did a lot of drills with them about how you actually protect your body from the blows they're going to take. he was concerned they would get harmed. he also taught them you have to be strategic. he would do things like i'm going to hope these naacp youth councils, but we don't want you to get suspended for being in the youth council, so we're

going to call this one the naacp youth club. and sometimes the naacp youth club meets, sometimes the committee, but it's all different names. and he would name things different names to keep it moving along so people could be strategic. what he would say, for young activists, be strategic, be prepared for any violence that you might meet, and stick together, because that's the other thing that these young people did. and one little story that really moved me was james chaney, he was in one of these naacp youth leagues, youth councils. and his first act as an activist was as a 15-year-old. he pinned an naacp tag on his shirt and got suspended. he had been an activist since he was a kid, a very young kid. >> i think medgar evers would

say, based on how he lived, to make sure you are fighting for the end result. don't get caught up in the drama of the moment. but make sure the drama is used toward an end result. and i think that that sometimes -- happened to me when i was a young activist. we get caught up in the drama, that we forget, is this working? like joy was talking about voting, that wasn't dramatic enough for a lot. but at the end of the day, that's what makes the difference. and you know that medgar evers never lived to see the voting rights act. but he was the one that made it possible. so, you may not see the results, but your strategy must be to lead the results. and like right now, we're living in a i told him the irony is

depressing as some of this is, donald trump will start on trial in the same building. he will start on trial in the same criminal courthouse that he called on the death penalty for the central park five. so those few of us that stood by the central park five, sit back and watch. that is the building we marched for those kids on. he is going to have to sit and watch a jury, prosecuted by a black prosecutor, that we voted and elected. if you had ever told donald trump a black prosecutor in georgia, a black prosecutor in new york and a black woman federal judge in washington -- >> and, while yusef salaam is

serving on the city counsel in harlem . >> this seems like a fitting following question. at the same we will keep our democracy? >> do you want to go first customer >> i think we have to get it to keep it. but, i think we will get what we fight to get. if we look at the fact that they are not going to do it and they never did, if there was one thing we can learn from medgar evers, you get what you fight for and you have to be willing to do more to get it then they are to keep it from you. >> amen. >> joy, this is for you, what advice would you give to young

black ladies who want to get into journalism today? >> yes, so, when i was young and a nerdy kid who loved watching the new speed >> you are still young, joy. >> thank you. i am still young and i am still nerdy. this is why you have to have your friends around you. good friends. i didn't have a role model for being a journalist. i didn't intend to be a journalist at all. i was supposed to be a doctor. i loved gwen ifill. i met her in 2015. they say interest, watch this, watch this. i'm going somewhere. in 2015, i'm going somewhere, i was in selma, alabama and my peripheral vision is terrible.

i see across the street, that looks like gwen ifill. i start running, running at her like a muppet. gwen ifill, you are the greatest person ever, you are my idol and she was so kind. she turned to this madwoman running at her, she opened her arms and gave me the biggest hug. i say that to say my advice would be, gwen ifill for me, i used to run track. i was nerdy but i was sporty too. i had athletic ability. that kept me from being in real trouble. i used to run third lake in the relay. you each have to run a full hundred and you have to hand off the hand off is the game. the first person sets the pace. that is gwen ifill. the person who picks up the pace has to keep the pace. you can't lose the case. i used to run third lake. you have to set up the next person for success and the closer have to close. if all four of those people don't do it, you aren't going to win. my advice to young journalists

is to know who your starter is. who is the person who is your inspiration? find a way to benefit from the inspiration of them, whether you get to meet him and hug them or not but learn what they did, learn all about what they did. learn about who that pacer was after them. how did the next generation of people after gwen ifill get in there? figure that out. if you can meet one of them, get one of them in your life, do that. if not, learn it yourself. if you get anywhere in that work, your job is to hand off. your job is to put the baton into the hands of someone else who might not have an opportunity. it is your obligation not to slam the door behind you. it is your obligation to see this as a really race, not finishing by yourself because none of us do this by our self. we have to have people willing to help us, let us in the door, and off to us and when we get the baton, if you don't hit it off, karma will hit you back, right back where you started.

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thanks for joining us this summer for a special edition of the rachel maddow show, which is my interview with