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

by Wendy Snyder
March and Rally to Challenge the City's Escalation of the War on the African Community Following the Murder of Chauncey Bailey
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.orguhurureparations [at] yahoo.com
Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
by Oaklander
So Wendy, are you encouraging us to oppose the OPD investigation of the murder of an African-American journalist working for African-American newspaper? I don't question the history of racism in the police occupation of Oakland's African-American neighborhoods. But I don't see how that history calls into question the fact that a journalist was murdered and that the killers need to be held responsible. Isn't that type of law enforcement constructive for the community, to rid it of a criminal enterprise engaged in a violent protection racket?
by radical
Out of 100 people of African descent in the US, I'd guess less than one identifies as "African," yet white wendy is ideologically beholden to this terminology.

This screed has no coherent point to make about the Bailey murder. It doesn't give one scintilla of evidence that his murder was committed by anyone other than YBMB or that it is being used as a pretext to contain the "African community."

Wendy refers to the "African movement" but nobody but Uhuru House is aware that any such thing exists. Sure, the Uhuru House sells some furniture and bean pies, but that's not what the term "movement" usually brings to mind.

Apparently fratricidal violence in the "African community" is termed "horizontal violence" by the Uhuru braintrust. The fact that many poor and working class blacks in Oakland--whom the Uhuru House claims to represent--(sadly) want more police to protect them from a horizontal departure from this planet escapes wendy and her small band of hot-house ideologues.

I'm curious what the Uhuru House believes should be done about Bailey's murder. Apparently nothing.



"...the Uhuru Movement, which represents the voice of the African working class and poor."

So, your racket "represents the voice of the African (American) working class and poor, huh? Do the aforementioned working class and poor have anything to say about this?

And what about Yusef Bey's rapes of numerous young African American girls who this predatory recationary creep "adopted?"

Maybe this is solidarity of one authoritarian cult or sect for another authoritarian cult & sect...
by republican
i think by making comments we are giving this pure nonsense more attention that it deserves...
by Oh, really?
One of the two current theories holds that all of humanity emerged from Africa and migrated all over the globe. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_single-origin_hypothesis]

That would make us all Africans. Does that make colonialism "horizontal" violence? And what about queer-bashing?

What is Uhuru's ideological position on homosexuality?
by Eamonn
Perhaps Wendy is only joking? Is it April Fool's?
by anti-thugs
I remember reading something in the 1980's, by Rick Ayers, I believe, in the Stalinoid Uhuru sect's paper, siding with Stalin against Trotsky because Stalin, as a Georgian, was closer to being non-white that the "metropolitan" (anti-semite-speak for Jewish) Trotsky!

As far as Stalin vs. Trotsky, a plague on both their houses.

Now back to the Bay Area: This Rick Ayers character was a functionary of the white-guilt-platoon of the Uhuru sect. And I think his brother was one of the leading members of the equally ridiculous, fueled by white guilt Weather Underground. White-guilt Stalinism appears to be congenital in their family.

What is Uhuru's position on Yusef Bey's victimization of African American women, and of under-aged girls as well?
by radical
a group that came out of the Weather Underground in the 80's called Prairie Fire had a relationship to a group called the New African People's Organization that was in some ways similar to the relationship between Wendy's white Uhuru doormats and the Uhuru House.

it shouldn't be surprising that, like two molecule fighting it out in a droplet of water, the Uhuru House considered Prairie Fire their archenemies because they were white people who chose to genuflect before NAPO and not them. kind of funny and sad at the same time.



by Talcum X
I never thought I'd see the day when Ron Dellums would be attacked as the hand that pulls the strings of the police state. But since he is the strong Mayor of Oakland, and he runs the police department, I can only assume that the Uhurus hold him responsible for the "containment" of "Africans."

The Uhurus have always reminded me of zombies. They're like some weird CIA mind control experiment gone wrong, an angry cult that set sail on a rudderless ark of paranoia and ignorance. Their argument against prosecuting Mr. Bailey's killers underscores the absurd and detached mindset of this group's leaders.

Their self-righteous obsession with Africanism makes it clear that they are gripped by a perverse pseudo-colonial narrative in which they -- and they alone -- can lead black people into the light of realization. This is very similar to the Manson cult's belief that they had to start a race war and then hide in desert caves until the "Africans" triumphed so that their elite minority of enlightened white masters could run the world.

Since the Uhurus don't have subterranean hideouts in the desert, we can only assume that -- once they liberate "Africans" from "containment" -- they will do the world a "favor" by donning their Nikes, pulling the purple sheets up over their heads and gulping the cyanide-spiked Flavor Aid.
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