by
Chauncey Bailey (Family photo)
It was 10 years ago this month that Chauncey Bailey, 57, a former Detroit News reporter, was murdered on a sidewalk in Oakland, Calif. He was investigating the people behind the thuggish Your Black Muslim Bakery, which was behind the hit. Two people are in prison for life.
Bailey was the editor of the Oakland Post.
A story in the East Bay Times by Thomas Peele suggests it's time to create a memorial in Oakland in his honor. I couldn't agree more.
I worked with Bailey at The News. He was passionate about the community, and he used journalism to show it. He had a following in Detroit. People cared about him.
He was also quite the character.
As the story goes, Bailey once attended a community meeting in the city. The top editor was there, and when the meeting was over, Bailey approached him with a group of his community supporters. Bailey was unhappy about being placed on the afternoon shift and confronted the newsroom manager.
The editor suggested they talk later about the work schedule change.
"I want to talk about it now Chump," Bailey reportedly insisted. He was suspended for a week with pay.
When he returned, I went up to him and said, "Welcome back." He said of his paid suspension: "I'll take that any day."
He went off to Oakland to keep on reporting until he was murdered on Aug. 2, 2007 for doing his job.
Peele writes in the Bay Area newspaper:
Ten years ago today, at 7:27 a.m., well-known local reporter Chauncey Bailey was gunned down on an Oakland sidewalk. He died for the First Amendment.
“Prominent journalist shot dead in street,” yelled a headline the next morning in the Oakland Tribune. But the thuggish remnants of Your Black Muslim Bakery — the black empowerment group founded by Yusef Bey that was behind Bailey’s slaying — targeted more than a lone reporter on Aug. 2, 2007. They targeted all of us, and not just journalists.
Everyone’s right to speak freely was assailed that day. It was, truly, “an assault on the American way of life,” one of Bailey’s former editors at The Detroit News said at the time.
The elder Bey’s empire had deteriorated by the time he died while awaiting trial on the first of multiple charges of raping teenage girls under his care. His son Yusef Bey IV, who emerged as the leader of the tattered enterprise in late 2005, ordered the hit on Bailey.
Bey IV and another man, Antoine Mackey, are spending their lives in prison with no chance of parole. The gunman, Devaughndre Broussard is serving a 25-year sentence at a private prison in the Arizona desert south of Phoenix.
They should be forgotten, especially Bey, who sent others to do his killings for him.
Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, should be remembered. He specialized in community news, but he was digging into a story about Bey and the bakery’s financial problems, and for that Bey ordered Broussard and Mackey to “take him out.”
It's not every day journalists in this country die while investigating a story. It happens more often overseas as bullies try to silence the truth.
A memorial would not only honor Bailey, but remind us of the importance of truth.
