I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

I was a member of the Black Student Union, part of the central committee at San Francisco State. During the 1968 strike there, I was certainly very much involved in the activities that occurred on campus. It was part of an extraordinary period in my life

The Black Power Mixtape is a documentary, first of all. It brings us closer to the voices we heard at that particular point in time.

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

When you've moved past a point where you're just scrambling for jobs, you think about the things that you want to do. And the things that you want to do are governed by what you've seen, what you choose to embrace

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

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.