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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

Heather McTier, Tony, may not be a name you've heard, but she's certainly someone you should know.

Elected Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi at the age of 27, she was led by her experience in that office to become a national leader in the battle for climate action and environmental justice.

Under President Obama, she served as a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and is now a leader of the national movement called Mom's Clean Air Force.

Heather McTier, Tony, also has been a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics this spring. We sat down to talk about her journey and her mission. Here's that conversation.

Heather McTier, Tony, it's so great to see you at the Institute of Politics where you've been this spring, inspiring a bunch of young people, a new generation of climate activists and others to take up the mission.

And so it's great to be with you. Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. I made a huge fan first.

Thank you.

And so I'm thrilled to be here and to be on the show. And you know, even more so to have this conversation, climate is truly one of the top has not only garnered a lot of attention, but you know, it's playing catch up quite frankly.

And so I think it's important for we get first to talk about this continuum. It is, but before we talk about it and you are one of the great climate activists and climate justice activists in the country, we need to know how you came to the battle.

And so we need to know a little bit about your story, which is an extraordinary story. You come from an extraordinary family, but talk about talk about Greenville, Mississippi and talk about the the McTier family.

There is no better place in the Mississippi Delta in my book. And I spoke like a former mayor, but we'll get to that.

Well, I tell you, I mean, just from the perspective, not just a former mayor, but someone who grew up in the churches in Greenville and went to public school and can think about all of the the times that I don't not only enjoy summertime is the levy, but you know,

I'm glad and trouble for running up and down to the streets going back and forth to corner stores in the middle of, you know, Sunday school. So it's just a lot of good memory of that space.

My parents actually came to Mississippi from Baltimore, Maryland as a part of the voters rights movement. My dad, my mom and dad are retired, but my, but the time my dad was a civil rights attorney and my mom, a public school teacher and they made a decision to come to Mississippi.

I'm not going to go to Mississippi, originally Mount by you Mississippi to work for two years. And here we are 40 plus years later.

Because I want to, I want to give the story. It's, it's full, it's full due your dad, Victor was one of the first black students at what was then called Western Maryland College. And it was the, and he went there when he was 16 years old.

And it was the experiences he had there that sort of set him on the course that he took. What was his experience as a young black man at the school where there were, where there were very few people of color.

Fortunately, my dad had another person with him, Joe S'mothers, who I know as my uncle Joe S'mothers, because he married my mother's sister.

The two of them were the first two at Western Maryland College, my dad on a football scholarship, my uncle Joe and basketball scholarship. And he certainly at the young age of 16 entered into an environment and a, at a time that was not only fraught with racism, but took a significant amount of boldness and bravery from not only him, but

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