Chauncey Bailey Murdered: When Violent Talk Turns to Action

Monday August 6 More Updates--see below

The previous post discussed violent language.

Chauncey Bailey was the  editor of the Oakland Post (web site currently unavailable), in Oakland, California.  On his way to work on Thursday, August 2, 2007, he was shot:

Witnesses told police a lone, masked gunman dressed in dark clothing approached Bailey, shot him once in the back and once in the head and ran away.

The following morning, a nearby business,  Your Black Muslim Bakery, were raided by a joint-forces task force. According to radio reports Friday afternoon, the raid had been in the planning stages for some period of time before Bailey's murder.  The radio reports also made clear that there is no connection between  the  business raided and Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

The raid netted a weapon connected to Bailey's  murder and a suspect was booked Saturday morning.  The suspect, DeVaughndre Broussard, had won an investment competition in 2003.

Links:
San Francisco Chronicle, Friday August 3 2007, reporting the murder
San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday August 4 2007, reporting the raids.
ABC 7 News, reporting the raids
San Francisco Chronicle Saturday August 4, 2007, reporting the arrest.
NBC News Friday August 3, 2007: Bailey Had Been Working On A Story on Your Black Muslim Bakery
KTVU Saturday August 4, 2007: Bakery Employee Confesses to Bailey's Murder

San Francisco Peninsula Press Club on Murder August 3 2007

Three Brothers and A Sister on Bailey's Death August 3 2007

New American Media:  Bailey's Obituary, Links to Previous Work

Department of the Usual Suspects:

Debbie Schlussel Uses Murder to Defame All Muslims
Michelle Malkin  claims YBMB  is an archtypically Muslim organization.

Robert Spencer, writing in FrontpageMagazine.com,  makes the claim that the murderer was following a pattern set down by orthodox Muslims.

NewsBusters claims that NBC and ABC ignored the murder (as you can see from the links above, that's incorrect).

Murder Suspect Mentored in High School by MBA candidate

2003 Press Release from Haas School of Business

Investment Portfolio Competition

At the Investment Portfolio Competition, 38 tenth-grade students presented their top investment choices to a panel of judges at Haas on Saturday, April 26.

The teams had spent the past year in the YEAH program using a computer simulation called Stock Quest to learn about the stock market. Each team started the year with a fictional one million dollars to invest and worked with a mentor to learn how to analyze target companies.

At the competition, the teams presented their portfolios, explained the rationale behind their investment choices, and described how those investments fared over a 12-month period. This year's winners were DeVaughndre Broussard, Alberto Fuentes, and Pierre Hudson. All three were mentored by second-year Berkeley MBA Tony Brekke. Each student on the winning team won a $100 savings bond.

Since 1989, the YEAH program has been using the principles and real-life lessons of business, finance, and entrepreneurship to educate under-served youth and support their advancement to higher education. The program has prepared more than one thousand young people for success in college and in the world of business and finance. Currently, the program serves nearly 300 students from dozens of schools in the Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and West Contra Costa school districts.

For more information on YEAH, please visit http://haas.berkeley.edu/yeah or call 510-642-7880.

Update Monday August 6

Kim Pearson, writing at BlogHer, has a post on Bailey's life and death.

Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens blames religion for the failure to put YBMB out of business.

I found the Rick Ross Report on Yusuf Bey and YBMB.  I should have looked directly; my bad.  The more I read about the group, the more powerfully was I reminded of Jim Jones and the Peoples' Temple (yes I am citing Wikipedia); David Koresh and The Branch Davidians.  Sex with underaged girls? Check.  Financial irregularities? Check. Very closed societies? Check. Intimidation by physical force? Check. 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, writing at New American Media, has an essay on black-on-black violence, especially assassinations of political leaders.

Shanikka, posting at Political Sapphire, writes a long essay on the tragedy on all sides.

The question arose: was Bailey's murder giving insufficient coverage due to racism?  Richard Prince has an accurate representation of the timeline of coverage.  No, the MSM didn't exactly jump on the story, but it wasn't exactly clear, Thursday morning, that Bailey was assassinated rather than being a random victim of the all-too-common gun violence in Oakland. 

By Friday mid-day (with the news of the raids) it became apparent that  Bailey's death was more than murder: assassination.  And then the coverage thins out again.

The Crunchy Con blog and Inside Cable News both address the issue.  I think Richard Bottoms, a commenter at the Crunchy Con blog, got it right:

Since the perps have been rounded up there's no "drama" to the story. Evil deed done, evil guys caught. Next story please. Hardly a surprise in the cable news universe.

It's not even listed as a story on the Fox "News" web site.

My Urban Report and Lynda Carson have links to others covering the story.

Darrin Bell, who writes the comic Candorville, publishes a rememberance of Chauncey Bailey.

 

Comments

[GraceD]

Thank you for these exhaustive and comprehensive sources, Liz.

When I read about this heinous crime, I couldn't move for a solid two minutes. Since leaving the East Bay/Berkeley years ago, I hadn't kept up with Your Muslim Bakery, whose wonderful pastries and pies I enjoyed while at Berkeley. I was horrified to learn that they were implicated in this assasination.

[Joel Sax]

Here's an old article that I found while looking for something else:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2002-11-13/news/the-sinister-side-of-yusuf-bey-s-empire/1

[junya]

Re: Earl Ofari Hutchinson's essay on black-on-black violence

As with every Hutchinson essay I've read (not many - I've learned to avoid them), there are so many things wrong with this essay that merely enumerating the fallacies is exhausting - much less attempting to correct them. So let's see if we can reach an understanding of these fallacies through a simple experiment, instead of a long refutation.

A comparison has been made between YBMB and other groups: People's Temple and Branch Davidians. I don't say I agree with that comparison, but it's a useful starting point. Here's the experiment:

1. Find articles describing the Jonestown massacre as an example of "white-on-black violence". Reportedly, the temple members were 80% African-American (browsing the photos on http://jonestown.sdsu.edu seems to support that). As with YBMB, race was an integral part of message of the People's Temple ("The Rainbow Congregation"), with Jonestown promised as a racial utopia. So why is the Jonestown massacre (it was mass murder, not mass suicide) typically recalled as an example of cult fanaticism and not "white-on-black violence"?

2. Find articles describing the Waco massacre as an example of "white-on-white" violence. Why is the BATF/FBI massacre also recalled as an example of cult fanaticism, and not "white violence"? Well that's not really fair: you'll never find US government violence described as "white violence". Whether in Philadelphia (the MOVE bombing), Iraq, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Guatemala, Iran, Korea or any other "non-white" country where the US government has massacred, it's never described as "white-on-nonwhite" violence. In fact, you'll never see the press decribe the US government as "white". Yet if it wasn't inherently white, there'd be no need to celebrate every token nonwhite as an example of "diversity". Truly pluralistic societies don't "celebrate diversity" - they live it.

Why are certain acts of violence singled out as "black-on-black violence"? Why do we not even hear the terms "white-on-white violence", etc. used? Why are some forms of violence accepted as normal, i.e. non-racial, and others held up as an example of a racial problem?

Try the experiment - then reread the Hutchinson article. Hutchinson, like Condi Rice, is only the latest in a long line that show you don't have to be "white" to further the cause of white supremacy.