People also don't understand how young the Panthers were - basically teenagers. And that they were over 50 percent women.

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.

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.

There's a similarity in both being young people who are not about the politics of respectability.

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.

People also don't understand how young the Panthers were - basically teenagers. And that they were over 50 percent women.

Once your leaders get corrupted one way or another, it's hard to stop the organization from being corrupted.