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

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

As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.

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.

Part of the problem with Occupy Wall Street was that folks were never really clear on what they were fighting for. If you don't know what you're fighting for, how do you know when you've got victory? In some ways, new media makes it easier for people to connect. It's hard, though, because we're much more seduced by the Internet, by big-screen TVs, by cell phones that can do everything.