For Some in Oakland, Editor's Death Shows Subversion of Black Activism

Bey's enterprise would eventually part ways with the Nation, but both preached a gospel grounded more in urban realities than in the Islam practiced by 1.2 billion people. Black Muslims rejected white America and promoted self-reliance and a strict discipline that both impressed and frustrated local police.

"They're helping the community. We're helping the community. We should be able to work together," said Sgt. Michael Poirier, chief of staff for the Oakland Police Department. "But as long as I've known them, their disdain for the police makes them difficult to work with."

On the median outside the bakery storefront on busy San Pablo Avenue, young men in suits and bow ties sold copies of the Nation of Islam newspaper and the popular bean pies. The bakery opened one stand at the Oakland Coliseum and another at the airport.

"At one time, it was an institution that brought pride to the community," said the Rev. Bill Reed, a Baptist clergyman who grew up in Oakland and returned for Bailey's funeral. "They had a great mission. They were training people coming out of prison."

Opinions differ on when things changed. A series in the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly, alleged that from the beginning, Bey used the patina of black empowerment to do as he wished. Oakland's establishment chose to ignore signs of trouble and elected leaders even channeled the project a $1.2 million federal loan, the weekly wrote.

"Let me make it real simple: This has been going on about 30 years. And it has been known," Marvin X said. The bakery "had a dark side, and it was as real as the light side."

In 2002, Alameda County prosecutors charged Bey with forcing a foster daughter to act as his underage mistress a quarter-century earlier. Bey died before the trial, triggering a succession crisis on the scale of the patriarch's profligacy: He reportedly fathered 43 children.

Months later, Bey's chosen successor turned up in a shallow grave. The son who then took over was killed in an attempted carjacking in 2005. New leader Yusuf Bey IV, then 19, was arrested that year for vandalizing two neighborhood liquor stores in a vigilante enforcement of Muslim prohibitions on alcohol. A year later, he was charged with trying to drive his BMW over bouncers outside a San Francisco strip club.

Intimidation was a recurring theme.

"It's not the death threats I minded, it's the credible death threats," said Chris Thompson, who after writing the exposés for the East Bay Express was told he would die, and found himself being followed. "It eventually got bad enough I decided to leave town for a while."

Deputy District Attorney Scott Swisher recalled 20 to 30 young men lining the corridors to a courtroom where four Bey associates were accused of torturing a Nigerian immigrant over money.

"The bow ties, the whole bit," Swisher said. "I felt like I was in the Antarctic. Isn't that where penguins are?"

Police said Devaughndre Broussard, the handyman charged in Bailey's killing, stalked him openly, masked but carrying a double-barreled shotgun down city streets. He allegedly found the journalist at the corner of Alice and 14th streets, where impromptu memorials have sprung up.

"It's just harking back to another era," Swisher said. "It reminded me of the Marcus Foster shooting. I sat up in bed."

Foster was the school superintendent killed in 1973 by a hollow-point slug dipped in cyanide by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Oakland guerrilla group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst and as ransom demanded food distribution to the poor. Foster, like Bailey, was black and well-regarded in the community steeped in the distinctions between militancy and street violence.

"It's a weird web, Oakland," said Malcolm Marshall, host of the "Youth Outlook" radio talk show. He stood outside the funeral with a tape recorder. "My question to people today is, 'Do you feel safe in Oakland?' And a lot do."

The police response comforted some. Hours after the shooting, in a predawn operation planned earlier, scores of officers swarmed the bakery. Seven men were arrested on charges including kidnapping and torture. Police said two other killings appear linked to the group.

"It ain't over. This community will know what Chauncey and I were working on," Post publisher Paul Cobb declared over his editor's coffin, draped in kente cloth. The crowd rose in ovation.