As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.
You can't imagine hip-hop without the Black Panthers. Today, hopefully, the movement can be an inspiration to people. These were people who made mistakes but they were trying to change things.
I want to be able to tell black people something they don't know, something about our own lives.
There's a similarity in both being young people who are not about the politics of respectability.
Cameras have really made people question the police. People, especially white people, are saying, 'Oh my God, we had no idea.'
Usually we look at it like, "Oh, black people couldn't vote in Mississippi because they had to take a literacy test." But one of the things you learn in the film is that there were major consequences for even trying to vote. You could be killed for trying to vote. You could definitely be fired from your job and many were, which is why so few black Mississippians even attempted to register early on. They put your name in the newspaper if you tried to register to vote.
Part of the problem with Occupy Wall Street was that folks were never really clear on what they were fighting for. If you don't know what you're fighting for, how do you know when you've got victory? In some ways, new media makes it easier for people to connect. It's hard, though, because we're much more seduced by the Internet, by big-screen TVs, by cell phones that can do everything.
As the voices beneath the music are talking, you find that the music is just as important as what they're saying. The traditional thing is to lower the music so you can hear the dialogue. We just couldn't do that for that song.
Instead of feeling like there's two or three of us in this town of hostile crackers, I'm in a big church filled with people who believe the same thing I believe and the power of song is raising what we're trying to do, raising it up to the rafters.
People also don't understand how young the Panthers were - basically teenagers. And that they were over 50 percent women.
When black men started bearing arms, these people who we think of as being pro-gun are saying, 'We ought to change this law.
Race is always tossed into the mix. The unspoken idea is always that white people have a right to carry guns and bear arms.
Once your leaders get corrupted one way or another, it's hard to stop the organization from being corrupted.
One of the most important parts of the civil rights movement that people don't talk about was these mass meetings. It's like "Movement Church." It's a combination of the music of the movement and the church. Those mass meetings are where people got the energy to go on to the next day.
