Civil Rights Attorney Maya Wiley grew up in a household that prioritized activism.

Her parents influence set her on a path to a lifetime of advocacy work and yet sometimes left her wondering how best to fulfill the family legacy on her own terms.

Her memoir published this week is called Remember You Are A Wiley.

We recently sat down to talk about it.

My O'Reilly, welcome to the news hour.

Thanks so much for having me, Jeff.

So much of this book is an untangling of your parents influence.

Your father was a prominent civil rights leader and social activist George Wiley.

Your mother, Rita Wiley was an academic and a civil rights activist in her own right. How did their activism shape

your life and shape your values? You know, they shaped me so profoundly that it felt so important to write this book and what I mean by

that is that you know when you when you're growing up with parents my father died

when I was young when I was nine years old. You know that they're impacting you but they also

spent a lot of time making sure we could be who we wanted to be and not insisting that we be who they were.

And I realized that, you know, what they really did was modeled what it meant

to rise to the occasion of a time you're in,

to recognize that to those who have been given much much as expected

that was a clear kind of value principle in my household growing up and that the expectation is you would do it you would step up in

any way you could and for me watching their activism I remember it was both at times

painful because I wanted or needed them but also it made me incredibly

proud. And theirs was an interracial marriage and you write about your

parents. There was no cultural difference between them. racial marriage and you write about your parents,

there was no cultural difference between them.

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