HorseLord posted:

Dressing up real nice and knowing how to speak well is useful, but serving the people is primary.

That's what got the Black Panthers popular. There was an intersection that was badly designed and people kept getting ran over, and the city wouldn't do anything about it. So they made a stop sign themselves and put it up. People were getting illegally harassed by the police, so they offered classes on people's rights and how to defend them. Kids were going hungry and couldn't focus in school, so they opened breakfast kitchens and ended up feeding 11,000 of them a day. Black people were getting turned away from doctors offices so they opened a clinic for blood tests. There were countless other examples of this, and they became so good at providing these services that the cities had to launch rival ones, out of pure fear that the BPP was going to become a defacto second government.

They also policed the police, the importance of which can't be understated in modern day America. It'd be incredibly risky for a cop to shoot another unarmed guy if fifteen heavily armed ones in berets and leather jackets are marching ten feet away.