Chauncey Bailey’s Murder Must Not Be Used to Attack the African Community!

Challenge the city of Oakland's policies of police containment and criminalization of the African community!

Protest on Tuesday, August 21st at 5pm at the Oakland Police Department at 7th and Broadway, followed by a march to City Hall at 14th and Broadway with a Rally and Press Conference at 5:30pm at Frank Ogawa Plaza before the Oakland City Council Meeting.

On Thursday, August 2nd, journalist Chauncey Bailey was fatally gunned down on the streets of downtown Oakland as he was on his way to work as the newly appointed editor of the Oakland Post. Bailey was greatly respected by Oakland’s African community as a well-known journalist. Over the years he was supportive and helpful to the Uhuru Movement, which represents the voice of the African working class and poor.

On August 3, the day following Bailey’s murder, the city and the Oakland police department, along with SWAT teams from surrounding cities, carried out a pre-planned raid on Your Black Muslim Bakery on San Pablo Avenue. A religious and economic organization that has operated for the past 40 years with financial support from the city of Oakland, Your Black Muslim Bakery is one of the institutions that grew up in the face of the U.S. government attacks on the Black Power Movement of the 1960s.

The police raided Your Black Muslim Bakery as well as residences in North Oakland, arresting several people, including 19 year old Devaughndre Broussard, whom the police immediately claimed to be the shooter. OPD alleged that Broussard had confessed to killing Bailey because he "was angry that
Bailey was researching the bakery's finances."

Four days later Mayor Ron Dellums unveiled his plan to bring in the California Highway Patrol to join the OPD in what amounts to military occupation of African neighborhoods in Oakland characterized by deep poverty, desperation and hopelessness. In a TV interview on Thursday, August 9th Devaughndre Broussard charged that Oakland police had beaten and coerced him into confessing to the killing.


City Uses Murder of Bailey to Forward Its Own Agenda

While events surrounding the killing of Chauncey Bailey remain unclear, what's certain is that the city of Oakland is using this high profile murder to further escalate its war against the African community. Under siege since the well-known FBI-coordinated COINTELPRO program of the 1960s assassinated the leaders of the Black Power Movement and destroyed its organizations, African communities in Oakland and around the country have borne the brunt of criminalization and police terror.

From the attacks on Black Panthers offices in 1969, to the assassination of Huey Newton on the streets of Oakland in 1989, to the formation of the Oakland Riders more recently, the city of Oakland and the U.S. government have worked to suppress the movement of African workers and make Oakland “safe” for white investment and gentrification.

The city of Oakland has never attempted to transform the desperate conditions facing African people in Oakland with a meaningful infusion of capital for genuine African economic development. Instead the city has imposed a toxic cloud of repression in the form of violent and heavy-handed police containment policies that make East and West Oakland resemble a Gaza or Sadr City. Oakland’s African community lives under the daily brutality of a government-imposed counterinsurgency.

It is well documented that Oakland’s African community was one of the first places in the country that the CIA and U.S. government flooded with illegal drugs in the late 1970s, which coincided with the destruction of many black businesses and the suppression of black rights.

At the same time California led the country in the building of prisons which it fills with young African and Mexican people criminalized under draconian Jim Crow Three-Strikes laws and sentencing guidelines that target Africans for life in prison while sending white drug users to treatment centers. The wealth of the illegal drug trade and the massive prison economy have been a key factor in sustaining the economy of California for the past 30 years. Today California alone has the second highest prison population in the world, exceeded only by the U.S. as a whole.

Like the Palestinians and Iraqi people, African people in Oakland—and throughout the U.S.—are a colonized people who have never enjoyed American citizenship since they were first kidnapped from their homeland and brought here as America’s most profitable commodity.


The murder of Chauncey Bailey and the current assault on African working and poor people in Oakland is part of the overall occupation, criminalization and destabilization of the African community in the on-going attempt to crush African resistance and organization and to open up Oakland for white people to buy up homes in historically black neighborhoods.

Increasingly the word “terrorist” in the U.S. is being given an African face. Last year seven young impoverished Africans from Liberty City in Miami were framed up on charges of “terrorism,” and here in the Bay Area 8 ?? African men from the Black Movement of the 60s were arrested for something that supposedly happened 30 years ago. In Oakland, Newark and cities all over the U.S., African people are subjected to horizontal violence in desperate communities fighting over crumbs under the thumb of martial law and enforced poverty—not unlike the “sectarian violence” created by the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The real criminal here is not Your Black Muslim Bakery or the African youth the OPD claims killed Chauncey Bailey. The perpetrator is a system that criminalizes a whole community from infancy on with names like “superpredator” or “permanent underclass,” giving African children a far greater likelihood of early death or life in prison than graduation from high school and a decent job. The real criminal is a parasitic system that builds a whole economy off of the prison sentences of a colonized people whose communities were crushed for struggling for political power.

Oakland: City of African Resistance

Oakland is the city that gave birth to the Black Panther Party, a people’s organization founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton. The Black Panther Party challenged the brutality of the Oakland Police Department and built
independent do-for-self programs that exposed the colonial reality of African people inside the U.S., espousing black political power as the solution.

The Black Panther Party was part of the movement to unite African people all around the world, thrusting African people into the struggles for national liberation that characterized the 60s, from Vietnam, to Cuba, to Algeria and China.

In 1967, the immensely popular Black Power Movement was labeled the greatest internal threat to the security of the United States. The FBI developed COINTELPRO or counterintelligence program to “prevent the rise of a
black messiah that would electrify and unify the masses of black people.” As part of this program, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton were assassinated. Many other leaders were killed, imprisoned or
driven out of political life. The U.S. government succeeded in decimating the organizations of the African working class in Oakland and all throughout
the United States.

Following the military defeat of the Black Power Movement the government began its counterinsurgency against the entire African population through the imposed illegal drug economy, police containment and massive imprisonment.

The Uhuru Movement Keeps Black Power Alive

The conditions for African people in the U.S. and certainly in Oakland are worse than they were 40 years ago. African people continue to face an imposed drug
economy, violence, substandard schools and housing and a lack of economic development.

The Uhuru Movement, an international organization of the African working class, has played an important role in challenging the conditions facing African people since the defeat of the Black Revolution. Centered at the Uhuru House at 7911 MacArthur Blvd., the Uhuru Movement’s many important campaigns in Oakland
have included the 1983 Tent City for the Homeless at Lafayette Park in downtown Oakland, the Community
Control of Housing Initiatives that won 23,000 votes in 1984 and again in 1986, the Bobby Hutton Freedom Clinic, a mobile health facility in East Oakland, and Uhuru Bakery Café on Telegraph Avenue in the late 1980s. Today the Uhuru Movement has thriving institutions, including Uhuru Foods and the Uhuru Furniture store on Grand Avenue and carries out many campaigns raising up the interests and aspirations of the African working class community.

The Uhuru Movement has challenged the patrols by the Guardian Angels and police in some predominately white neighborhoods as vigilante attacks on the impoverished African community. The Uhuru Movement has also exposed how grants available to the city because of its large African community have not benefited African and oppressed communities but have benefited the relatively affluent white neighborhoods.

The Uhuru Movement calls for economic development, not police containment in response to the problems that African people face in Oakland and everywhere else.

Build African People's Solidarity Day

On October 13th and 14th, the African People's Solidarity Committee will host African People's Solidarity Day, a teach-in and fundraiser at Beebe Memorial Cathedral at 3900 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland in support of the worldwide movement for African liberation.

African People's Solidarity Day will feature African leaders from the U.S., Haiti and West and South Africa—African people speaking for themselves. The African People's Solidarity Committee works under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, organizing other white people to stand with the African liberation movement as the solution for the conditions facing African people everywhere. The Uhuru Movement follows in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah in calling for one united and liberated Africa as the birthright of African people everywhere.

As we look at the war, violence and suffering faced by African and oppressed peoples around the world today we have to recognize that the wealth of America and the white world were built on the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the indigenous and the colonization of peoples around the world. The struggles in Oakland – and in the world are struggles of oppressed peoples for their resources, self-determination and control over their lives and destinies. As we look at the crisis of the U.S. government and economic system we can see that the only hope for a future of peace, freedom and prosperity is a future in which African and oppressed peoples everywhere are liberated from the oppressive hand of U.S. imperialism which steals their resources, labor and land.

Participate in building African People’s Solidarity Day to educate others about the truth about America past and current situation. Learn about the roots of poverty, violence and oppression that built America for white people at the expense of Africans and others. Learn about solutions led by African people themselves.

Meetings are held every Thursday at the Uhuru Solidarity Center, 1601 - 2nd Ave, Oakland (near East 18th)

(510) 569-9620 or 510-625-1106. • http://www.apscuhuru.org • uhurureparations [at] yahoo.com