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.

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.

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

When black men started bearing arms, these people who we think of as being pro-gun are saying, 'We ought to change this law.

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

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.