How To Access Text Between Tags

For example I have an array of List elements.

HTML Code:
<ul id="my_div"><li>
<div class="title">title1 here</div>
<div class="message"><a href="#">message1</a></div>
</li><li>
<div class="title">title2 here</div>
<div class="message"><a href="#">message2</a></div>
</li>
...
</ul>

I iterate through each list element, and do something like:
$("#my_div").each(function(){
$(this).find(".message").html();
});
This code will give me:
<a href="#">message1</a>
But is there a way to just get "message1" ????