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Killing The Messenger: A Story Of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, And The Assassination Of A Journalist (2012)

by Thomas Peele(Favorite Author)

3.97 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307717550 (ISBN13: 9780307717559)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Crown

review 1: Tricknology Comes In All ColorsIt’s often said that the devil is in the details. For example, it’s often the small things that become the most important in making a legal case. Most experienced writers would agree that this concept also applies to their profession: the tiniest details can make or break a story. This may tempt authors into emphasizing or embellishing details that seem to reinforce a theme; to present the facts in a way that fits the frame.One may receive impressions of this in the first forty pages of Killing The Messenger, Thomas Peele’s new book about ideology, murder, and journalism, set primarily in Oakland, California. For instance, one may wonder why the author, who in the first paragraph of the introduction states, “Oakland was little more th... morean a place I passed through to get anywhere,” should choose to inform the reader of gritty little details such as Oakland’s Lake Merritt “had been created from a drained swamp in the 1860s,” or at low tide the area where the lake drains into the San Francisco Bay (actually the Oakland Estuary) “reeked of rotting mussels ripped open by hungry gulls.” He might have said that Lake Merritt is the largest saltwater lake located within an urban area and is quite picturesque. And what could be more natural than seagulls feeding on mussels? But of course he was trying for gritty atmosphere; just as one could add grit to San Francisco’s image by mentioning that much of the riprap around its Aquatic Park is composed of old tombstones leftover when the city moved most of its graveyards to Colma in the early twentieth century.Likewise, the author repeatedly describes the neighborhood around the (former) Your Black Muslim Bakery on San Pablo Avenue, home base for the semi-legit organization that this book is about, as being the “North Oakland ghetto.” Having frequented this bakery for fish sandwiches, as well as still passing through the neighborhood at least once a week, this reviewer can attest that while it’s not one of Oakland’s upscale communities, it’s far from being a ghetto. Nor did this reviewer ever find the bakery’s visible staff anything less than pleasant, neat, clean, and physically undamaged -- particularly in regard to ostensibly battered females -- or observe the “compound” being guarded by “thugs in bow ties” or “the frenzied pit bull and mastiffs" (one may wonder what was frenzying them) though that would have certainly been wise at night, and many businesses take similar precautions. None of which is to say that this reviewer admired the Black Muslims or agreed with their doctrine -- though the sandwiches were killer -- but rather to note that superfluous details, especially when one already has an ironclad case, may undermine credibility. For example, when the author describes the kitchen of Your Black Muslim Bakery as housing “steaming industrial ovens, assault rifles leaning against them, spent cartridges and banana clips scattered on the rat shit-flecked kitchen floor,” readers may wonder why there was (apparently) shooting going on among baking buns, and/or why Black Muslims were (again, apparently) exempt from State Health Department inspections. (One may also wonder how Mr. Peele was able to observe all this.) Just as an experienced pilot noting technical errors or inaccurate descriptions might doubt an author’s qualifications to write about airplanes, so, too, many readers who have experienced inner city life, if not actually in Oakland, may begin to distrust the author.Earning readers’ trust is especially important when an author is writing about black people, who are so accustomed to being misrepresented and negatively portrayed that many automatically distrust or outrightly dismiss anything written about them, especially by a non-black author. It is therefore unfortunate that the first three chapters of Killing The Messenger appear, at least to this Oakland-based reviewer, as if Peele was trying too hard to set his stage and included a few doubtful props. While Part One of this book, opening with the August 2, 2007 gangstuh-style murder of Chauncey Bailey, an Oakland Post editor who was working on a story about Your Black Muslim Bakery, may abound with gritty descriptions of thugs, thuggery, and Dashiell Hammett meets Boyz n the Hood atmosphere, one quickly forgives Peele when he settles down to solid journalistic writing, especially since Peele was a principal in the Chauncey Bailey Project, an ad hoc group of journalists dedicated to reporting the circumstances of Bailey’s death. But, though the hook is the murder of Bailey, an undistinguished journalist whose article, Peele notes, would probably not have been very good, Bailey is actually a very minor character. The real story is about the Black Muslims, and particularly the Oakland-based Bey family. For decades, Peele reports, the Beys used their health food bakery as a front for criminal activity, operating largely untouched by police. (The bakery’s founder, Yusuf Ali Bey, actually ran for mayor of Oakland in 1994.) It was only when the erratic, overmatched Yusuf Bey IV assumed control in 2005 that everything began to crumble.With exceptions noted and forgiven, Killing The Messenger is a very well written and thoroughly researched book; this becoming apparent as one gets deeper into it. Like James A. Michener, when Thomas Peele writes on a subject he begins at the roots, in this case a man named Wallace Dodd Ford, aka Walli Dodd Fard (and many other akas), who filled out a draft card on June 5, 1917 stating his birthplace as Shinka, Afghanistan, his birth date as February 26, 1893, and his race as “Caus” (presumably an abbreviation of Caucasian)... ironic, since he was the co-founder of what would become the Black Muslim faith, after teaming up with a spiritual charlatan who styled himself Noble Drew Ali from Morocco, though reputedly born Timothy Drew in North Carolina, USA. (It should also be understood, as Peele makes clear, that the Black Muslim “faith” is Islamic in name only, just as the Ku Klux Klan bills itself as a Christian organization.) The book, backed up by 74 pages of acknowledgments, notes, and bibliography, traces the history not only of the faith itself -- which was based upon the same kind of “Tricknology," a term coined by its founders to describe the deceptions, misinformation and outright lies foisted upon black people by whites to keep them confused and disunited -- but also the individual histories of the principal men involved. Unlike the Black Panther Party, which had its roots in Oakland and was for the most part purely political, the Black Muslims cloaked their militancy in pseudo-religion, encouraging violence not only in their brainwashed believers but also providing a justification to those who simply wanted to hate and act out their hatred by killing. Peele brings vital historical context to the contemporary aspects of his tale: the establishment of the Bey family in Oakland, the rise and fall of the Your Black Muslim Bakery Reich, and the eventual murder of Chauncey Bailey; a foolish, arrogant, and typically thuggish act, which, rather than removing a perceived threat to the organization, actually brought it down.As with virtually all the dramatis personae in this book, including Elijah Poole (later to become Elijah Muhammad) and Yusuf Bey IV, the young high-priest of Your Black Muslim Bakery and supreme commander of its less-healthy sidelines, Peele offers detailed studies of their origins and backgrounds, often not without sympathy in regard to conditions, environment, and events in their lives which may have contributed to what they became. For example, we learn the life history of Devaughndre Monique Broussard, who would become Bey’s hit-man for Chauncey Bailey’s murder; an all-too typical story of a young black man raised in a soul-crushing environment of poverty, drugs, and violence in Richmond, California who wasn’t strong enough to somehow rise above it or see though that kind of Tricknology. As Peele acknowledges, though most of these men had seedy backgrounds, it was pretty difficult for any black man, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, to be squeaky-clean in regard to white laws, morals, and values. Peele’s extensive research about the horrific oppression of black people in the U.S., not only during the early but though most of the twentieth century, serves well to explain part of Killing The Messenger’s subtitle: Racism’s Backlash, the backlash being the rise of an organization claiming to be a religious faith professing hate toward white people. But, Peele is not hesitant to give white devils their due, whether brutal and murderous police, racist politicians, journalists or officials, or discriminatory government, city, or business policies. He describes several attacks by police upon Black Muslims in various cities that ended in outright murder of black men, the officers involved invariably cleared of any wrongdoing, just as, in the recent past, police in the Bay Area have gotten away with the murders of black men with excuses that would be laughable had they not left someone dead. Hardly a wonder that, then as now, certain young black men would be attracted to an ideology that encouraged them to fight back.Throughout the book’s 350 pages, Peele presents detailed accounts of how various individuals became involved with and/or ensnared by the Black Muslim movement; some idealistically, many -- especially young black men intellectually stunted by the U.S. public education system and emotionally scarred by the US judicial and prison systems -- because it offered opportunities no one else seemed willing to offer. Broussard, for example, a once-promising student who lost his way, is Peele’s Exhibit A: an impressionable youth who was lured by the financial and emotional shelter the Beys provided.Did anything positive come out of this? While Peele seems a bit cloudy on this point, he also appears to imply there did. Though he may have somewhat embellished the grit and grimness of Oakland, he also seems to acknowledge the thousands of young black men taken in off the streets or when fresh out of prison who would have likely been behind bars -- or behind bars again -- had they not been offered productive jobs and educated in matters of self-worth, physical and mental discipline, and personal integrity, and who may well have gone on to live better lives by using these teachings as a basis to self-educate and think for themselves. In other words, Peele seems to realize there are shades of grey in everything—no absolute evils, no untarnished goods, and few saints or devils without their own motives.Killing The Messenger may well be the best, most thoroughly researched, and -- with exceptions noted -- most objective of any book thus far written on this subject, and is no doubt destined to become required reading in many colleges and universities. Hopefully it will also be read in prisons to educate young black men that Tricknology comes in all colors. If the devil is indeed in the details, Peele has given us many demons to exorcise.
review 2: It is unusual to have a true crime book (which I am calling this) with African-American victims and suspects. This is one of the books. Chauncey Bailey was killed by a member of fringe set of Black Muslims in Oakland, CA in 2007. But the book goes deeper than the crime. It follows the history of the Black Muslims in America, how this sect was created by Yusuf Bey and how Bey and his son, Yusuf Bey IV, terrorized the streets of Oakland (and how no one was able to stop them). It took me several weeks to finish the book, but I enjoyed it. less

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