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.

Cameras have really made people question the police. People, especially white people, are saying, 'Oh my God, we had no idea.'

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

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

I want to be able to tell black people something they don't know, something about our own lives.

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.

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.