Chauncey Bailey was that rarity in American journalism: a reporter
assassinated in the United States for doing his job.
Elsewhere, the degree to which
journalists take their lives in their hands when they go after stories that others want kept
secret is distressingly routine. Here, though, until Bailey’s death in 2007, the
last known hit on a local news reporter was more than 30 years before, when a
car bomb took the life of Don Bolles
in Arizona in 1976. The death of Bolles has never been definitively explained, although a suspect was
convicted in 1977, but speculation has long labeled it a Mafia hit.
Bolles’ death sparked The Arizona
Project, the first-ever intensive collective journalistic investigation
bringing together reporters from around the country to demonstrate that
violence would not silence the press. And after Bailey’s death in Oakland,
Calif., a team of Bay Area journalists and students came together in a similar
mission.
In a new book, Killing the Messenger, Thomas
Peele, a California investigative reporter who was part of the four-year Chauncey Bailey Project, now
tells its story and those of Bailey and his killers: the cult leaders of a
Black Muslim bakery in Oakland and the impressionable member who was the gunman
that killed Bailey.
Peele will visit Boswell
Books at 2559 N. Downer Ave. this Friday evening at 7 p.m. to read from and
speak about his book. We spoke by telephone earlier this month.
Peele says that from the moment
Bailey was killed, not long after he began looking into the shady Your Black
Muslim Bakery as editor of a shoestring paper serving Oakland’s black
community, the call to assemble a team to finish his work was inevitable.
“As soon as Mr. Bailey was killed
and it became very quickly apparent why he’d been killed, there really wasn’t a
choice in the matter,” Peele says. “The Arizona Project had provided the
template and shown what had to be done when a reporter in this country is
killed over a story. It had a feeling like it was a mandate. Those of us who
took on the work took that mandate seriously.”
The rarity of such assassinations
in the U.S. – in contrast to almost everywhere else in the world, from Mexico
to the Middle East to Asia – made it no less urgent to take up the cause, Peele
says. “It had to be done to show that this could happen to any reporter who
seemed to cross the wrong people.”
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| Thomas Peele |
Bailey himself had a somewhat
checkered career as a reporter, and Peele’s book never shies away from that. On
the one hand, he was creative and energetic, displaying a talent for finding
stories in his community that others missed. Yet he also ran afoul more than
once of simple ethical rules, ultimately getting fired from the daily Oakland Tribune for writing a soft-soap
feature about a business owned by a woman he was dating and never telling his
editors about their relationship. That, Peele says, only came after a “secret
probation” that Bailey had been put on by the paper for an earlier ethical
breach that rightly could have cost him his job even sooner.
“He was a complex guy,” says Peele,
who never met Bailey, but came to know him well through interviews with friends
and colleagues of the late reporter. “He was extremely passionate about his
work, even though he sometimes did have serious ethical dilemmas.”
Bailey wound up at the Oakland
Post, which named him editor. “He saw the Oakland Post as a sort of last gasp through which he could get any
sort of redemption for what he’d done at the Tribune,” says Peele. “He was excited about the opportunity to
still be a newspaper man. And even though it was not much of a newspaper, for
the first time in his career he’d had the title of editor, and that meant a
great deal to him.”
Peele says that as Bailey took on
what on the surface looked like a “fairly routine story” about the bakery, he
nonetheless brought to it a deeper understanding of the organization behind it
– a Black Muslim group that was independent of the Nation of Islam headed by Louis Farrakhan but was inspired by the
original Black Muslim founder W.D. Fard in 1930. Back in 1974, Bailey had been
one of the first reporters to link the Zebra Killings – random murders of
whites in San Francisco – to a Black Muslim group.
Peele also mines the history of the
organization whose leader ordered Bailey killed. He traced the story of the
founders of the Black Muslim movement, he says, because he wanted to plumb the
depths of the belief system of Yusef Bey, the Oakland cult’s founder, and later
his son, Yusef Bey IV, who would order Bailey’s assassination.
“Yusef Bey was a con man,” Peele
says. “He was exploiting people. I wanted to go back and trace the exploitation
that was the genesis of the organization.”
And that history and the worldview
it engendered, he says, shows some of the roots of Bailey’s death.
“They practiced a radical faith,
borne out of a backlash to horrendously racist conditions that the people who
founded the movement were subjected to,” says Peele. Bailey’s death “is one of
the very unfortunate outcomes of a very flawed and fictive belief system that
was foisted on very poor, exploited and ignorant people starting 82 years ago.”
I asked Peele if there are there larger lessons for journalism in
the Bailey story.
“There’s a need for reporters to be
aware of the potential dangers that they face, especially when they’re dealing
with a marginalized and radicalized story subject, as he certainly was,” he
says of Bailey. “But that awareness can’t lead to us not doing our jobs.”
And there’s also a sobering
awareness that, whatever unwritten “hands-off-the-press” rule might once have
kept journalists relatively safe, it can no longer be any kind of certainty.
While 31 years may have passed between the Bolles and Bailey killings, “I think
it would be naïve to think it wouldn’t happen again.”
The persistence of fringe
organizations of all kinds, Peele says, represents an important ongoing story
that news organizations must pay attention to.
“We have a duty to do that,” he
says. “I don’t think the need for good journalism has ever been greater.”
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