Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Coming Soon from Black Bird Press: Who Killed Chauncey Bailey and A Short History of Black Muslims in the Bay by Marvin X
Who Killed Chauncey Bailey
and
A Short History of Black Muslims in the Bay
by Marvin X
The hand that pulled the trigger didn't buy the bullet!--James Baldwin
Chauncey was our soul, blood and bones. And we take authority on the matter of facts concerning his assassination. We are taking authority on his legacy to our community and the world.We do not accept the OPD's, the DA's, or CBP's explanation of his cold blooded murder.--Paul Cobb, Publisher,
Post Newspaper Group
At his best, Marvin X is clarity of perception.--Gerald Ali, United Kingdom
Introduction
As per the Chauncey Bailey assassination, we must look beyond the Black Muslim Bakery young men to the critical role the Oakland Police Department played in the conspiracy to silence warrior journalist Chauncey Bailey. We knew his foibles, but we all have them, though one thing is clear: he was a dedicated journalist, yes, a community journalist.
The reader will find in these essays the repetition of our conclusion that the OPD has blood on its hands in the matter of Chauncey Bailey, as it has had in the murder of our people since the masses arrived during WWII.
We are not bemused at the conclusion of the Chauncey Bailey Project that it could find little substance of police misconduct, if not outright conspiracy under the color of law.
We have herein a collection of essays written on our friend, brother, comrade in the craft of writing, Chauncey Bailey. Yes, it is an alternative view of the matter, for even the left media has repeated the same racial and religious bias as the Monkey Mind Media in the persona of the Chauncey Bailey Project. We know some who claim to be with the 99% are undercover 1%ers.
If you like, call it a poet's view of the matter, assume it is all from my imagination, call it a poetic fantasy, but know for sure I am focused on revealing truth, no matter what or whom.
Why was the raid on the bakery delayed until after his assassination? What about the OPD mentor that allowed three homicides by his initiates? Why would the chief of police tell Oakland Post Publisher Paul Cobb to get a bullet proof vest if he pursues a police connection? Why did the DA refuse to subpoena Paul Cobb to testify on the investigative work of his editor? Why did the Chauncey Bailey Project refuse to make the OPD a focus of investigation as Paul Cobb demanded when he called for the Chauncey Bailey Project?
We try to answer some of these questions or at least make the reader think about them. We compare the murder of Chauncey with that of Malcolm X, a combined Muslim/police affair. We consider Chauncey drama and the characters in classic Shakespeare, especially Othello, the tragic Moor.
In part two of this book we look at "Othello's Children", the Muslims in the Americas, especially North America, the Bay Area in particular. We give a short history of black Muslims in the Bay, circa late 1950s to the present, i.e., up to the assassination of Chauncey Bailey, 2007. Our main focus is the Nation of Islam, its influence on black consciousness, black liberation, e.g., ten point program of the Black Panther Party, the Black Arts Movement, black studies and hip hop conscious rap. Bay Area legendary personalities include Aaron Ali, aka R.T.X. Ashford, John Douimbia, Minister Majed, Minister John Muhammad, Dr. Yusef Bey, Minister Billy X, aka Robb Muhammad, Nisa Bey, Tarika Lewis, Fatima, aka Sister Capt. Helen, Fahizah Alim, Christopher
Muhammad, Keith Muhammad, Imam Shuaib, Imam Alamin.
We look at the role of Bay Area black Muslims in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the Zebra killers, but also on the positive side, the raising of consciousness, economic development, cultural expression in arts, literature, music, social justice, e.g., David Muhammad as Chief Probation Officer for Alameda County.
We have our view on Thomas Peele's book on the Black Muslim Bakery. When we study the history of religiosity, we find all faiths falling short of the glory of God, Allah. No matter what is said of violence in Islamic lands, it doesn't equal the trillion dollar budget of the US military to wage permanent wars across the planet. Muslim culture will never equal in barbarity the treatment North American Africans received from Christian America down to this moment, 2012, with slavery under the US Constitution or involuntary servitude the new mode of free labor, mostly for petty crimes, 90% of those convicted were under the influence of drugs at the time of arrest, additionally, they suffer mental ailments qualifying them to be classified as the dual diagnosed, with little or no mental health treatment while incarcerated. Let us not mention the slavery originated stop and frisk laws, especially in New York City, where nearly a million North American African and Latino or Indigenous men have been stopped and/or detained.
It is our conclusion that we must go Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality. Yes, this will necessitate discarding our comfort zone rags, yes, it will require us to jump out of the box of ignorance, passivity, conspicuous consumption, and other of the one billion illusions of the monkey mind.
Finally, we have been at war in America for 400 years: there is no duty for the slave except to overthrow his master. That was our mission from the beginning, that is our mission now. We can fulfill it or betray it, but we cannot escape it. As-Salaam-Alaikum.
--Marvin X, El Muhajir
2/15/12
Who Killed
Chauncey Bailey?
Preface: writers recall Chauncey: Kwan Booth, Zusha Elison, John Woodford, Marvin X
Remembering Chauncey Bailey,
newspaper editor, mentor and friend.
By Kwan Booth
Deadline nights in the newspaper business are sacred. Nothing compares to that last minute rush of writing, editing and designing, trying to squeeze in that last crucial detail before going to press. When I heard that Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, was killed yesterday morning, “deadline night” was the first thing that came to mind.
For the last 2 ½ years I’ve been a writer and editor at the Post and Chauncey and I worked together on several occasions. Some of my best memories are from Tuesdays in the production room at 2am: huddled around a computer screen-shirt sleeves rolled up, bags under everyone’s eyes, cups of stale coffee littering every counter top. I remember some nights looking over at Chauncey and seeing the fatigue on his face. But more than that there was the joy-the man was addicted to the news and the business associated with it.
These were the times he relished. These were also the times when he opened up the most. Reports from the last 24 hours have repeatedly mentioned his hallmark aggressive style and brevity, and for good reason. Chauncey wasn’t one for small conversations. From the way he answered the phone-”This is Bailey. What?” to his habit of writing stories in the body of emails or dictating them to layout designers directly to speed the process-he was all about getting it out quick, hard and correct.
But his style always came across as more tough love than “tough shit.” Late nights he’d open up about the screenplays and movies he was working on and his frustration trying to get movie studios to read scripts that showed real life black characters. He’d tell stories of his years chronicling the African American community in the Bay Area and Detroit and the roadblocks he encountered trying to increase the presence and credibility black people in the media. The man truly loved people and he was the first person to really drive home the importance of knowing the people you write about. He would always say “how can you report on the community if you’re not in the community?”
We’d have long debates on media and the best way to reach under served neighborhoods. I’d call him a dinosaur for his unrelenting faith in the power of print news and old school TV broadcasts. He thought I put too much emphasis on all this “new media.” His rationale: you’ve got to reach people where they are and most poor folks aren’t checking for the Daily Kos. Understandable coming from a man who never figured out how to send an attachment in an email, but from those late night conversations I learned a lot about the inner workings of the news industry.
Chauncey taught me everything from how to really grill public officials to how to score a spot on the coveted “press junket.” We often joked about it in the office, but Chauncey really was the James Brown of Bay Area reporting-”the hardest working man in journalism.” He refused to have a computer in his house, explaining that he’d “never stop working.”
It was a regular thing for staffers to make late night and early morning runs to the office to find Chauncey sitting there, hunched over his computer, ballpoint pin in his mouth, eyes three inches from the screen surrounded by mountains of press releases, phone numbers and story notes. Chauncey had a great feel for what people wanted and was a big fan of short, tightly written stories. He liked to tease the reader and make them come back for more next week.
He regularly chided contributing writers for their verbosity “I wrote about the entire state of black people in California in 300 words, why do you need 800 for a record review?” This article-756 words written in his memory-would have probably driven him nuts and I can imagine him over my shoulder with a red pen in hand, slashing copy. Like most journalists he didn’t like to be the center of attention and I could see him bumping his own memorial for something more “newsy.”
For just this once though, long winded or not, I hope he’d agree that the length of the article fits the occasion. Chauncey you were a good dude, a trusted mentor and a hell of a newspaper man. Your contribution to the community will be greatly missed. End of story.
The Chauncey Bailey Murder Trial: A Personal History
The author, who knew the victim, reflects on the murder of an Oakland journalist
Journalist Chauncey Bailey was killed in 2
007
It’s strange to cover a murder trial when you know the man who was murdered – and several people on the witness list.
I met Chauncey Bailey when I was an editor and reporter at the Oakland Post. There, I also had my first encounters with Your Black Muslim Bakery, whose leader, the young Yusuf Bey IV, is on trial for ordering the hit on Chauncey for a story he was working on about the bakery.
The Oakland Post wasn’t the most obvious place for my first job as a journalist. The Post is a venerable African American weekly newspaper and I was a young white Jewish kid fresh out of college. But it was the first paper to offer me an internship after I rolled into Oakland in my red pickup truck – and it turned out to be an excellent training ground.
In one of my first encounters with Chauncey, he appeared on the Post’s front page – as a subject, not a writer. He was leaving the Oakland Tribune, where he’d long worked as a staff writer – and was moving to St. Kitts. There, he would somehow serve as the Oakland Post’s "Caribbean Correspondent." The headline, written by Paul Cobb, the word-playing publisher of the Post, read: “Let’s Just St. Kitts and Say Goodbye.”
Chauncey was a news-generating machine, a tough no-nonsense questioner, and always smartly dressed. When he returned from the Caribbean and began appearing on the Post front page as a writer, he would sit at his desk and pound out a half-dozen stories a day. At the same time, he was writing stories for the Globe, a competing black weekly, and doing television shows for two competing TV stations. As Paul liked to say, “He was the James Brown of journalism: The hardest working man in the business.”
The Post was always short-staffed and getting the paper together each week was an entertaining scramble. I would write, edit, take pictures and lay out the pages. After Chauncey came along, we easily filled the paper each week with his stories. Some appeared under his byline, some under “Post Staff,” just for variety.
Although I was technically an editor, I was young and inexperienced and Chauncey taught me how to report and write quickly and how to turn most anything into the story. By example, with his tough questioning, he taught me how to cut through politicians’ bullshit.
When, after a year and a half at the Post, I was eying an open position at a weekly paper in Marin, the Post newsroom good-naturedly gave me shit: I would surely be writing about hot tubs and yachts instead of the more life-and-death issues in Oakland’s black community. But Chauncey took me aside and told me it would be good for my career, which even though I ended up writing about yachts, it was.
Chauncey eventually succeeded me as editor of the Post.
The first contact I had with Your Black Muslim Bakery was writing a story for the Post about the death of Waajid Aliawaad Bey. He was an adopted son of the charismatic and controversial founder of the bakery,
Yusuf Bey, and had inherited the throne after Bey died in 2003. Soon after, Waajid was found in a shallow grave in the Oakland hills.
Waajid Bey’s murder has never been solved, but I remember interviewing the young Antar Bey, another son of the founder, who’d taken control of the bakery after Waajid’s death. Throughout the interview, he said he had no idea who the killers were, but insinuated with his cavalier and mocking tone that business had been taken care of.
Soon after, Antar Bey was
murdered at a North Oakland gas station. Another son, Yusuf Bey IV, now accused of ordering Bailey’s murder, followed him as the leader.
Sitting in the advertising department of the Oakland Post was another key player in the saga. She was a former model and a lieutenant in the Nation of Islam and went by many different names throughout her life: Sister Felicia, Nisa Islam, Nisa Bey and finally Nisayah Yahudah as I knew her.
Dressed fashionably and often sporting blonde hair, Nisiyah volunteered to sell advertising, though she didn’t sell much, and she had some sort of modeling agency on the side. She was a friend of Chauncey's and, as it turned out, the ex-wife of the bakery’s founder, Yusuf Bey.
As the Chronicle reported in a
well-researched story by Matthai Kuruvila, many thought it was Nisiyah who’d passed word along to the bakery that Chauncey was working on a story about their crumbling finances – sparking anger and eventually murder.
Nisayah, too, is a witness in the murder trial.
I had been gone from the Post for less than two years when Chauncey was gunned down while walking to work on the morning of August 2, 2007. I visited the spot and attended the enormous funeral at Allen Temple.
Time has passed. But seeing the photos of Chauncey’s dead body — riddled with red holes from shot-gun blasts — that the prosecution put on the screen this week was like getting punched in the stomach.
A few months after Chauncey was killed, I was at the laundromat near my house and I ran into a man who ran the North Oakland branch of Your Black Muslim Bakery on Telegraph Avenue. (The headquarters that was raided the day after Chauncey was murdered was on San Pablo Avenue). We’d become friendly over the years. He’d help me with stories occasionally and I would buy those famously thick bean pies from him.
There are small visceral reactions to traumatic events – and since Chauncey had been murdered I felt sick at the thought of those bean pies, so I hadn’t been back to his bakery. I approached him while we were washing our clothes, demanding answers about what had happened. He blamed the young men who’d had taken over the bakery: they were wild and didn’t listen to their elders.
The explanation was hardly satisfying.
Now those young men are on trial. On Thursday, Devaughndre Broussard, 23, who pleaded guilty to shooting Bailey at close range with a shotgun, was on the stand. He was there to implicate the head of the bakery, Bey IV, for ordering Bailey’s murder because of the stories he was working on. Bey IV, who is now 25, was sitting at the table in a tan suit jacket with a matching tan bow-tie – the signature accessory of the black Muslims. Bey IV, who infamously led missions to destroy liquor stores for selling alcohol to the black community, is also on trial for ordering the murder of another man.
Progress in the case has been made. Excellent reporting by the
Chauncey Bailey Project, a group of journalists that banded together to investigate his death, and others nudged the District Attorney to eventually charge Bey IV. At first, Broussard had taken the rap alone. Broussard’s testimony will be key to convicting Bey IV, but the defense plans to discredit him using his criminal past and changing stories about what happened on August 2, 2007.
It was the first time I'd seen Broussard and Bey iV in person. I was struck by how young they were. I wondered if they even understood what Chuancey's life as a tireless journalist and a voice of the black community was all about. Related Chauncey Bailey – The Carnage has No End in Sight Jury Selected in Chauncey Bailey Murder Trial Bey Blames News Media for Tainted Jury Zusha Elinson Reporter covering bikes, buses, BART, buildings, and buds at the Bay Citizen. I was a legal reporter at the Recorder, an editor at the Marinscope and I started my career at the Oakland Post. Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12b4F)
How We Viewed Chauncey Bailey in the Midwest
by John Woodford, Editor, Michigan Today,
University of Michigan
Mainly, out here in the Middle West, Chauncey acted as a gadfly--one of those Black journalists who seemed to enjoy getting a rep as a contrarian against Black progressives. Now, on one hand, that is positive in that it sparks self-criticism and open debate, which helps ventilate musty ideas and perspectives. But on the other, it can boil down to delighting the racists who like to foment public fights between all of African descent. Stimulating and exploiting financially internecine combat among Blacks is a time-old ploy. For example, right now we have this current concocted controversy over what Jalen Rose had to say about his teenage opinions of the Fab Five's Black competitors on the Duke basketball team. So Chauncey played and enjoyed that sort of role, possibly deriving his role from his conservative Catholic upbringing, which includes in part a proclivity to debate for the pleasure of it. Nevertheless, the commercial, white-dominated media gravitates toward those who will assume that role. On the other hand, it took courage for Chauncey to expose not only what seemed to be gangterism in the Oakland Black community but in the law enforcement, courts and city hall as well. And whatever differences I may have had with some of Chauncey's essentially America-Firster international politics, I admired his guts and the way he relished argument.
Chauncey Bailey's Last StoryChauncey Bailey's last story did not have his byline as he was known to do with many stories. The story was more important than his name, after all, he said to me, "Do you know how many stories I write in a week?" But his last story was a review of my book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. It was a good review, not detailed as the Reginald James review that appeared in the Post, but the short story Chauncey was known for when he came into the editorship of the Oakland Post.
When it did not appear in the Post the week scheduled, I did not call to ask why. But a few days later Chauncey came down to my outdoor classroom at !4th and Broadway to show me a copy of his story and informed me it would be in the current week's paper. He wanted to let me know he wasn't "jiving." I said OK, but could I have a copy of it? He said no, then in what seemed like a flash, he was gone around the corner, like Clark Kent. He disappeared into eternity because I never saw him alive again. He fell victim to an assassin's bullet early the next morning, a few blocks down 14th at Alice.
I appreciated Chauncey because he was the "writer's writer," who wrote daily as I do--dedicated to his craft. When he interviewed me for the story, he had no tape recorder, nor did he take extensive notes. After all, he knew his subject, having written about me several times throughout his career while at the Oakland Tribune and the California Voice.
As news director at Soulbeat television, he appointed me as commentator, although it was short-lived because Chuck Johnson removed me for giving a radical opinion of the first Gulf war. The real reason was because Chauncey did not tell Chuck of his appointment. Chauncey would do silly things like that. There was a writer's conference at the African American Library/Museum in which I participated, but I left the conference when only a few people showed up. I went to the Black Cowboy event at Defermery Park. When Chauncey saw me there, he asked why wasn't I at the writer's conference. Off the record, I told him because all the nigguhs are at Defermery--look around. I thought my remarks were off the record, but Chauncey reported them on the Soulbeat evening news, totally upsetting the conference planners, who demanded I explain my remarks. I couldn't get mad at Chauncey as I am known for doing similar things when people tell me information that
should be kept off the record.
But again, Chauncey was the writer's writer, often without tape recorder or even without taking notes. His brain was his tape recorder and note book. Yes, he was that good.
Chauncey Didn't Need a Byline
Every writer wants an attribution to his story, a byline. Chauncey Bailey wrote thousands of stories with no byline. It only said California Staff or Sun Reporter Staff or Oakland Post Staff or Oakland Tribune Staff, yet it was all Chauncey Bailey, multiple personality, yet one essential message, truth.
Chauncey was so bad!
He didn't need a tape recorder
his mind worked
in the tradition
he listened
he looked into your eyes
then told your story
no notes
you could look at Chauncey
interviewing
writing nothing
you wonder
what dis nigguh doin
but he got it all
gist of it for sure
that's Chauncey
my man
my brother
I love you Chauncey
I miss you.
--Marvin X
https://theblacklist.net/
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