DAR AL HARB - U.S.A. - CALIFORNIA: UPDATE ON THE MURDER OF CHAUNCEY BAILEY

Bey IV speeches a month before Bailey killed
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

One month before the slaying of a journalist who was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery, the bakery's young leader urged his followers to be "strong soldiers" and combat the many enemies he said were conspiring to bring down the embattled Oakland institution.

"We fight the government, we fight the police, we fight our own families, we fight our own people, and we fight Caucasian people daily - just to do right," Yusuf Bey IV declared in a fiery videotaped sermon obtained recently by The Chronicle.

"They use our own people to go against us - people like you or I - to go against a strong organization like Your Black Muslim Bakery," he also said. "It's going to take strong men to stand up, it's going to take strong soldiers to stand up and do something for ourselves."

The sermon, delivered sometime in July, presaged the Aug. 2 street corner shooting death of Chauncey Bailey, editor of an African American community newspaper, who had been working on a story about infighting and financial problems at the bakery.

Arrested on unrelated kidnapping and torture charges after Bailey's death, Bey IV denied complicity in the journalist's murder. But police quoted Bey IV as saying Bailey had slandered his late father, bakery founder Yusuf Bey, who died in 2003.

Meanwhile, the bakery handyman who confessed to the slaying, Devaughndre Brouassard, 19, told police he had killed the journalist to be a "strong soldier," according to an investigator's notes - the same words Bey IV used in the sermon. Broussard later recanted and is awaiting trial.

A video recording of another Bey IV sermon from 2007 also provides insights into the bakery's close relationship with former Oakland Police Chief Joseph Samuels, now a federal airport official in Florida. Bey IV declared that Samuels had "told all his officers: Leave Your Black Muslim Bakery alone, they're brothers."

By contrast, Bey IV said current Chief Wayne Tucker, whose officers at the time were investigating Bey IV's followers on suspicion of a long list of crimes, was a "racial devil."

Bey IV, 21, delivered the sermons at a time of turmoil. Unable to pay the mortgage and payroll taxes, he had put the bakery into bankruptcy. He also was awaiting trial on charges of directing the trashing of two Oakland liquor stores, reportedly because they were violating religious law by selling alcohol to black people. Much of his vast family had sided against him in a bitter and allegedly violent power struggle that had begun after his late father died of cancer while awaiting trial for rape.

In both videos, he stands at the pulpit in the bakery's San Pablo Avenue compound, portraits of his late father and Nation of Islam founders W.D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad hanging on the wall behind him, and urges his followers to defend the bakery against its enemies.

"Anybody out to get Your Black Muslim Bakery or sabotage Your Black Muslim Bakery, God has plans to go right back against you," he said in the July sermon. "This is the reason that after 45 years, we're still in business."

The bakery, he said, has endured because God acts against its enemies.

"As long as you are doing what God wants you to do, and God is in your favor - excuse my language - the hell with everybody else," he said.

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Chauncey Bailey



Pertinent Links:

1) Bey IV speeches a month before Bailey killed