OAKLAND — Friends, family and former colleagues of slain local journalist Chauncey Bailey held back emotions as they unveiled the Oakland street sign that now bears his name and marks the site of his 2007 murder.
The half-mile stretch of 14th Street between Lakeside Drive and Broadway will now be known as Chauncey Bailey Way. As former colleague Paul Cobb recalled at a ceremony Saturday, the path is significant to Bailey’s life for a number of reasons.
Bailey would walk down 14th Street to get to his office at the Oakland Post, where he served as editor-in-chief. Occasionally, he would stop to buy coffee for homeless residents along the way. The street also leads down to Oakland City Hall, where Bailey spent many afternoons as a prolific local journalist with a focus on crime and policing.
More infamously, however, the street is where Bailey was gunned down on Aug. 2, 2007. A jury later convicted Yusuf Bey IV, the leader of the Your Black Muslim Bakery and a subject of Bailey’s investigative reporting, of ordering the journalist’s assassination.
The street renaming was introduced as a resolution by then-Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney in 2020 and approved unanimously by the City Council.
During a somber ceremony Saturday, Bailey’s former associates remembered him as a steadfast newsman, a champion of the First Amendment and a resonant voice in the city’s Black community and press coverage.
“It really shook me in a big way,” said Cobb, the current publisher of the Oakland Post, Northern California’s largest Black newspaper, of Bailey’s death. “I looked out of our window; I could see him laying on the ground. It was a surreal experience.”
Bailey studied journalism at Merritt College in Oakland and then San Jose State University. He worked at Black newspapers the Oakland Post and San Francisco’s Sun Reporter, then went to the Detroit News, Hartford Courant and United Press International before returning to Oakland to work at the Oakland Tribune for much of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Cobb noted how Bailey’s reporting often scrutinized the Oakland Police Department, asking questions of law enforcement that others at the time would not. Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan recalled how Bailey approached reports of crime with skepticism.
“Many times, Chauncey and I would talk about the ridiculousness of things that got covered up and needed to be told,” Kaplan said at the ceremony. “He was always ready to speak out when something didn’t make sense.”
Thomas Peele pointed to both Bailey’s life and death as symbols of the free press’ importance. Bailey believed in the importance of informing his community, even handing out newspapers for free on buses while a reporter at the Detroit News, Peele said.
“It was tragic and utterly senseless — Chauncey’s assassination was a direct and brutal attack on our First Amendment rights and freedoms,” said Peele, now a reporter for EdSource who worked prominently on the Chauncey Bailey project, a reporting collaborative that investigated Bailey’s death. “He’s a martyr for all of us, and it makes the honor that was bestowed upon his memory and his family today very clear.”
Bailey’s legacy has lived on in his son, Chauncey Steven Bailey Jr., who spoke about his own education in racial justice and a long history of Black journalism — a journey inspired by his father.
“He wanted us to carry a sense of pride, and valued the idea that every day, if we could just survive, live, grow and preserve our culture, that we are creating Black history,” Bailey Jr. son said.
Staff writer Annie Sciacca contributed reporting.
