The murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey has brought the end of an era in Oakland. Youth Radio reporter King Anyi Howell sees Bailey’s murder as especially significant in Oakland at a moment when the city is wracked with crime involving young people --- given the Bailey’s tendency to hold all parties – the people in the community, and institutions of power – to account. He sent this remembrance.
Some people in Oakland are upset that Chauncey Bailey’s murder investigation is getting so much media coverage, while other numerous acts of violence here fall into obscurity. But I’m not one of them.
Chauncey Bailey dedicated his life to covering the news in his city. And he did it with passion and conviction. When he became a headline himself, the least WE could do was to return the favor.
Youth Outlook publisher Kevin Weston has worked in San Francisco Bay Area
media since he was a teenager. He says Bailey was tenacious, prolific, and one of a fading generation - investigative journalists plugging away for an underfunded black press.
WESTON (on tape)
Because it is so cash strapped, a lot of times, what you read is the good news. And that’s also a certain kind of class coverage – the political or business or middle class. If you’re talking about the real problems, in Oakland especially - drugs, poverty, police violence – as a journalist you really have to look with a critical eye regardless of your own politics. That’s what he did so well, and that’s what cost him his life.
Weston says at Bailey’s funeral, he heard lots of questions that the Oakland community wants answered more thoroughly.
WESTON (on tape)
When was the last time OPD solved a murder in 24 hours, when they have the suspect and the gun? How did they pull together this big squad of police from around the bay in 24 hours?
ANYI
It seems like Bailey would be the type to ask these questions.
WESTON (on tape)
Well, he would’ve been.
ANYI
And that’s the irony of this tragedy. The one person who’d hold all parties accountable and approach the story with the most critical thinking …is the victim.
ROCCEFELLER (on tape)
Any time I seen Chauncey, he had a camera and a microphone, he had a tape recorder, or he had a pen and a pad. He was always working on something.
ANYI
TV producer James Earl Roccefeller once engineered Bailey's news talk show on SoulBeat, the local cable network. That's how many young people in Oakland knew Bailey best. It was a call-in, town hall forum of sorts, where Bailey would weigh in on all manner of political and social issues in Oakland.
ROCCEFELLER (on tape)
Again, James Earl Roccefeller.
I remember when they first started to say you had to have insurance for your car because people were getting into accidents... this one cat called in and said "That's just another reason for them to take black people's cars". And Chauncey was just like man just get insurance... he was straight nosed, they used to call him a sellout, and I was like no, he’s just real.
ANYI
If callers got out of hand, Bailey deployed his technologically advanced "Video Caller ID." It displayed the caller's image, he said, then a picture of a chimpanzee would pop on-screen. Or a baboon, or donkey. I would bust out laughing. He didn't take himself too seriously...and he ALWAYS got the last word, while staying focused on giving his community a VOICE. Kevin Weston says this proximity to the community was Bailey's
strength.
ROCCEFELLER (on tape)
*Usually when journalists end up dying they're in Iraq. If you're in the black press dealing with issues in community you have to deal with people. Chauncey had newspapers in his hand when he was killed. I don't know if a lot of young journalists even know Chauncey Bailey. It's up to folks that knew him to keep that spirit alive - older journalists have passed it down to us - and hopefully you will be that to someone else.*
ANYI
And Weston says one way to DO THAT is to get busy reporting. There are plenty of stories, he says, in Oakland right now that young people should be telling - and that ONLY we can tell.
ROCCEFELLER (on tape)
These young men dying in huge numbers at their own hands. These young women out here on the streets selling their bodies. Who is going to be able to break it down better than ya'll can? And really, to make money, you don't necessarily have to. You could be covering rappers. This is something you have to have a passion for, to feel like you have a calling.
ANYI
As I listen to Weston talk, I wonder who is going to take on the task of local investigative reporting in an industry that one, doesn't pay well...and two, could cost you your life. So it remains to be what influence Chauncey Bailey had on Oakland’s young journalists, and who among my own generation will step up to take his place.
