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

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

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.

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.

As the voices beneath the music are talking, you find that the music is just as important as what they're saying. The traditional thing is to lower the music so you can hear the dialogue. We just couldn't do that for that song.