
AT&T Park shook so hard I thought I was on a pogo stick the night Barry Bonds crushed a 3-2 Mike Bacsik pitch into right center to go past the great Hank Aaron and crown himself Major League Baseball’s all-time home-run king. He circled those bases to a deafening hometown roar.

Ted Pontiflet is an Oakland icon. He is East Coast swing meets West Coast bop. Classy. The man is too smooth to be close to 80. Ted is around until Dec. 1 and then away he goes.

I recently watched the Zachary Stauffer documentary “A Day Late in Oakland,” which is about the murder of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey in August of 2007. It is truly a look into the mind of white power media spin-doctors.

In this manifesto that shows why JR Valrey is rightly called the Minister of Information, he exposes “gentrification journalism” as “the public relations team that is put in place to make gentrifiers feel safe,” the media’s twisting of the murders of Chauncey Bailey and Oscar Grant to demonize Blacks and the hyper-funding of “hyper-local media” as an effort to drown out community media. Everyone who wants to stop the exodus of Blacks from the Bay must read this.

Chauncey Bailey was probably the best known Black journalist in the Bay Area, yet his own Black newspaper is ignored by every agency investigating his murder. Justice for this Black journalist cannot be achieved by silencing Black journalism. By interviewing only the mainstream media, Democracy Now is implying that the Black press and the Black community have nothing significant to say about the murder of the Black editor of a Black newspaper.

When the full story is finally told and, though not likely freely admitted by many, deep within the spiritual thinking of numerous African Americans, an emotional candle will be lit in memory of Lovelle Mixon.

Jan. 23 the movement for justice for Oscar Grant III kicked into high gear at the Prisoners of Conscience Committee’s Town Bizness Town Hall Meeting. Follow up by packing the courtroom at Johannes Mehserle’s bail hearing Friday, Jan. 30, 2 p.m., at 1225 Fallon St., Oakland. Don’t let the cops outnumber us.

Mayor Dellums decided to look to law enforcement as a model for healing the community in 2007. Today, we are still at war, our youth the casualties of this war.

Everything about Chauncey Bailey’s life and work spoke of his devotion to the Black community. Yet the Chauncey Bailey Project appears to have veered far off the course that Chauncey was taking.
In this 2001 TV interview with New California Media (now New America Media) host Emil Guillermo, Chauncey Bailey says the Black press “can’t be objective. It was born out of a role of activism. California Voice, founded in 1919, right in here (as he points to the paper) about ‘Blacks charge Alameda cops with abuse.’ [...]

Over the last year, there have been hundreds of stories in the local and national media accusing young men from Your Black Muslim Bakery of the murder of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey. Yet with all that coverage, we have not heard Yusuf Bey IV himself, successor to the Bakery’s founder, address these accusations.

On the murky day of Aug. 8, Black Oakland remembered the life of career journalist Chauncey Bailey, who had been murdered the week before on a downtown Oakland street. Hundreds of people filled every place imaginable in the East Oakland Catholic Church of St. Benedict.