There is a lack of leadership outside the Beltway, outside of politics.

[The strike in 1968] brought us together with teachers and also with progressive whites. All of us came from diverse backgrounds, but at the same time the reasons why we were at San Francisco State in the late sixties was because of the agitation and movement building that had occurred within our communities. We saw ourselves not separate from the community but intimately connected to it.

President [Barack] Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture.

In The Black Power Mixtape , you hear the voice of Angela Davis - not someone playing Angela Davis.