Chauncey Bailey

1949-2007

Journalist

In the summer of 2007 veteran journalist Chauncey Bailey Jr. was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of Oakland, California. Bailey's murder appeared to have been a contract killing, or murder for hire, linked to his investigative reports for the Oakland Post, the weekly newspaper he edited. In the weeks prior to his death, Bailey had been working on an exposé of a local Black Muslim group whose leaders had been accused of financial wrongdoing and even murder. His death prompted a raid on the group by a multiagency government task force a day later, which some said came a day too late.

Bailey was born in 1949 and spent the first years of his life in East Oakland, California. When he was eleven years old, his family moved a few miles south to Hayward, a largely white suburb, where he delivered the local newspaper, the Hayward Daily Review. One of the customers on his paper route complained, however, about having an African-American youth as a paper boy, and it was then that Bailey chose his future career. "I decided that day that I was going to be a journalist," San Francisco Chronicle writers Leslie Fulbright and Matthai Chakko Kuruvila quoted him as saying, because he realized that a byline did not tell readers the race of the journalist.

At Hayward High School Bailey worked on the student newspaper and went on to Merritt Community College. He earned his journalism degree from San Jose State University in 1972 but had already been working for several news organizations by that time. He wrote for the Oakland Post, a black newspaper, and the San Francisco Sun Reporter; he also reported on-air for KNTV, the local ABC affiliate. Around 1974 Bailey took a job with the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, remaining there for three years before working for United Press International in Chicago and then as a publicist and legislative press secretary. In 1982 he was hired by the Detroit News as a reporter and columnist, and he spent the next decade at that paper.

Bailey returned to his hometown in the early 1990s and began working for the Oakland Tribune. He was also active in various cable-television projects as a producer and host of public-affairs programming. In 2005 his association with the Tribune ended after he was found to have written a letter to the California State Department of Motor Vehicles on Tribune letterhead, a violation of the newspaper's ethics code. He returned to the Oakland Post, one of five weekly newspapers owned by the Post News Group that serve various African-American communities in the Bay Area. He became editor in chief of all five titles in June of 2007.

Bailey lived in and reported from Oakland, a Bay Area community with a long history of African-American political activism. The militant Black Panther group had been founded in Oakland in the mid-1960s, and the city retained a radical streak even decades later. A Black Muslim sect had been active on several fronts, owning several commercial and real-estate ventures that had provided jobs for scores of residents over the past few decades. This Oakland branch of the Black Muslims was not affiliated with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, but they did wear similar dark suits and bow ties and preached a doctrine of self-sufficiency. One of their businesses was Your Black Muslim Bakery, which had opened in 1968 and had once included several outlets. The bakery was founded by Yusuf Bey III, who led Black Muslims in Oakland for the next thirty-five years.

Bailey had known Yusuf Bey for many years and written many articles about the Black Muslims and the bakery, most of them positive in tone. Bey ran into trouble with authorities, however, when accusations surfaced that he had fathered a child with a thirteen-year-old girl back in the early 1980s. Charges were filed that claimed Bey had seduced at least three other girls under the age of fourteen. Bey died in 2003, however, before his case went to trial. The death set in motion a chain of events that would end with Bailey's tragic slaying, as Bey's heirs, noted Josh Harkinson in Mother Jones, "squabbled over control of the organization; one of Bey's sons was killed, and the rotting body of the bakery's CEO was found in a shallow grave. Still, Mayor Ron Dellums and other top politicians continued to lavish Bey's clan with praise and patronage even as allegations of vandalism, fraud, and kidnapping continued."

Bailey reported on the scandal and on the series of events that resulted in the bakery's filing for bankruptcy in October of 2006. The Bey heirs who had wrested control of the bakery were accused of financial mismanagement and were also said to have engaged in intimidating acts, such as firing automatic weapons in the air, harassing stores that sold liquor—Black Muslims are teetotalers—and even assaulting residents of the apartment buildings they owned. Bailey was writing another inflammatory story on the organization, and had secured the cooperation of a high-ranking Bey heir; when that person visited Bailey at his Oakland Post office, he was recognized by a newspaper employee with long-standing ties to the Bey family. Though the paper did not run the article that accused some of the Bey heirs of murder, Bailey became the target of their ire. On the morning of August 2, 2007, he left his apartment and began his daily walk to his office. He was approached by a man in a ski mask and dark clothing, who fired a shot into Bailey's chest with a sawed-off shotgun, then shot him twice more before fleeing in a waiting van.

Law-enforcement agencies had been investigating the bakery and the Beys for some time and closed off several streets in Oakland the next day at 5 a.m. to conduct a raid on businesses and properties owned by the group. Seven people were arrested, and a nineteen-year-old former employee of the bakery confessed to killing Bailey but later recanted. Several news organizations pooled their resources to establish the Chauncey Bailey Project, which is dedicated to investigating Bailey's death and bringing those responsible to justice. Others were perplexed at the lack of coverage given to Bailey's death, the first known targeting of an American journalist for death since 1993. A founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, Paul Delaney, discussed the matter with columnist Richard Prince on the Web site for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. "It's extremely unusual for an American journalist to be killed in this country," Delaney remarked. "The USA media jump to it, especially if in Iraq or Afghanistan or Mexico even. Comparisons are easy and obvious. Thus, if a white American editor had been gunned down, you bet it would have been a bigger story."

At a Glance …

Born on October 20, 1949, in Oakland, CA; died of gunshot wounds, August 2, 2007; son of Chauncey Sr. and Bridgett Marie Bailey; married Robin Hardin (divorced, 1995[?]); children: Chauncey III (with Tamara Martin). Education: Merritt Community College, AA, 1968; San Jose State University, BA, journalism, 1972.

Career: Oakland Post, reporter, beginning 1970; KNTV, San Jose, on-air reporter, 1970-71; San Francisco Sun Reporter, writer, 1971-74; Hartford Courant, staff writer, 1974(?)-77(?); United Press International, rewrite desk editor, 1978(?); California Voice, journalist, 1978-80; Comprand Inc., publicist, 1980; U.S. Representative Gus Savage (D-IL), press secretary, 1981-82; Detroit News, reporter and columnist, 1982-92; KDIA radio, public affairs director and newscaster, 1992-93; Soul Beat Television, interviewer and commentator, until 2003; OUR-TV (Opportunities in Urban Renaissance Television), cofounder, producer, and host, 2004; Oakland Tribune, journalist, 1993-2005; Oakland Post, freelance writer, 2005-07, editor in chief, beginning June of 2007.

Awards: George Polk Award, Long Island University, 2007.

Sources

Periodicals

Mother Jones, November-December 2007, p. 23.

New York Times, August 4, 2007.

Oakland Tribune, August 4, 2007.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 7, 2007.

Online

Prince, Richard, "Scant Coverage for Bailey Killing," Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, August 5, 2007, http://www.maynardije.org/columns/dickprince/070805_prince/ (accessed March 16, 2008).

—Carol Brennan