Joy-Ann Reid
Joy-Ann Reid has a connection to Denver that stretches back to 1970, when as a two-year-old, she left her birthplace of Brooklyn, New York and arrived in Denver with her father, Congolese immigrant Sebastien Ibeke Lomena, her Guyanese-born mother Philomena Carryl Lomena and her year-older sister June Lomena. The family moved into a house on Vine street, where Mother Douglas, the austere grandmother figure who lived across the street, became the watchful eye over Philomena’s daughters while she worked at a federal agency as a staff nutritionist. Soon came a younger brother, Oren, a parental divorce, and a move to the Montbello neighborhood, where the now family of four first lived on the working class side of town on Sable Street, where the girls went to Ford Elementary School and then moved across town to a larger house on 47th Avenue Circle, where they transferred to McGlone Elementary.
Montbello in the 1980s was an “upside-down town,” meaning its tidy homes were filled with working class and black residents redlined out of other parts of Denver proper. In those days there were two predominantly black neighborhoods in Denver: middle- and working-class Montbello, and struggling, urban, predominantly black Five Points, which in the early decades of the 20th Century had been known as the “Harlem of the West.”
Resistance to desegregation meant painful experiences for black students, including a seventh grade June, who was among the last class bused to white schools in Denver. The resistence of white Denverites and the ugly experiences black students experienced, even in the late 1970s pushed Denver Public Schools to build a neighborhood school for Montbello students. In 1980 Joy-Ann was among the inaugural seventh class at Montbello Junior and Senior High School.
In Denver, the Lomena family revelled in adventures: from car trips to the Rocky mountains and to Four Corners Park and around the American West, and even to Oaxaca, Mexico, to supporting Oren’s participation in outdoor youth sports and June’s participation in Five Points’ Miss Juneteenth pageant. Five Points seemed to the Lomena kids to be a world away; the forbidden downtown kingdom of black magic -- of nightclubs and theaters and a black culture that to a group of immigrants’ kids seemed mysterious and intriguing. In 1986, Joy-Ann graduated from Montbello High School and headed off to Harvard University. But the Lomenas were now a family of three, after Philomena succumbed to breast cancer that same year.
Joy-Ann Reid has had a 20-plus year broadcasting career that includes local and cable TV news, radio and columns. She hosts “AM Joy,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays from 10 A.M. ET to noon ET. She is the author of three books: Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide, We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, which she co-edited with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, and her latest book: The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story -- published in 2015, which spent four weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list. Reid also co-hosts a podcast: Reid This-Reid That with veteran journalist Jacque Reid. She has worked in local and national TV news, talk radio and as a press secretary during two presidential campaigns, including for Barack Obama's campaign in Florida in 2008. Her columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, New York Magazine and The Daily Beast.
