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.

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

Race is always tossed into the mix. The unspoken idea is always that white people have a right to carry guns and bear arms.

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

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.

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.

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.