Brian Lerer on WNYC, you may know my next guest, Maya Wiley. If so, it's probably because she ran in the Democratic

primary for mayor of New York in 2021 or has been a legal

analyst on MSNBC. Some of you may know she chaired the city's civilian complaint review board,

the agency that hears complaints about NYPD actions from New Yorkers who feel they've been

wrongly treated by them. That was under Mayor de Blasio. She was also de Blasio's chief counsel

for a part of his administration.

These days, she chairs the leadership conference on civil and human rights. And now Maya Wiley

has a book, a memoir called Remember You Are a Wiley. It's her personal story, obviously,

including about her father, a well-known civil rights leader in his day,

but who also died tragically when Maya was young, and about her work in politics and activism

on issues important to her as a grown-up. Maya, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book,

and welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

It's a real pleasure to be with you.

Why'd you write a memoir now?

Well, that's such a good question.

And let me start by, you know, there's no, in a way this was a very long journey.

I had planned to write a book about social movements after I left City Hall, actually, and before I ran for mayor.

Because we had seeing a time when we had the fight for the $15 minimum wage, where we had times up, where we had Black Lives Matter, where we had so much organizing and activism across a range

of critically important areas of our lives. And I was very moved by it, excited by it, but also

a bit frustrated that there wasn't a deeper understanding that these weren't just hashtags, that it

wasn't social media that made the movements as much as

a long history of organizing. And I knew that because of my parents. I knew that because I had the

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