Father and son: Yusuf Bey (rear), founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery, stands next to son Antar during an effort in early 2003 to get young black men off Oakland's streets.
Posted on 10/08/2007 7:55:10 AM PDT by SmithL
But in a three-year reign of violence and crime that police say culminated in the Aug. 2 assassination of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, the new generation destroyed Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery, a prominent and controversial symbol of black empowerment founded by the charismatic Yusuf Ali Bey.
Since Bey's death in 2003, the neatly dressed, heavily armed young men who ascended to power in the bakery's hierarchy have been implicated in assault, intimidation, theft, fraud, kidnapping, torture and, finally, homicide, court records show.
The day after the killing of Bailey, who had been researching stories about the bakery, police raided its San Pablo Avenue headquarters.
They arrested Chief Executive Officer Yusuf Bey IV, 21, the founder's son and namesake, on kidnapping charges, and booked a member of his entourage for Bailey's murder. The bakery itself is bankrupt and its assets up for sale.
Oakland police had long believed that the bakery's members were terrorizing the community, but said they were unable to act. "That happened over and over again - there were allegations of either force or intimidation, but not many wanted to give us formal statements or pursue prosecution," said former Oakland Police Chief Richard Word. "People were afraid."
As a consequence, he said, bakery members began to feel as if they were untouchable. "There was an aura of invincibility," he said.
The beginning of the end for the bakery arrived in the form of a sex scandal that engulfed its founder in the months before his death, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Father and son: Yusuf Bey (rear), founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery, stands next to son Antar during an effort in early 2003 to get young black men off Oakland's streets.
Get the thugs off the street and into my gang............
That nasty old white power structure just keeps holding the brothers down.
Was that photo taken on the set of the old Batman TV series?
Ask David Horowitz about how the best-intentioned plans go awry, often with fatal consequences. Horowitz raised funds for and administered an inner-city school on behalf of the Black Panthers in the 60s. Then a friend of his discovered “irregularities” in the way the books were being kept. She disappeared when she confronted the Panther leadership and her body was found a few days later. Horowitz was basically told to mind his own business or he’d be next.
Good point. Same story, different thugs...
Maybe not, but a Lutheran Bakery would only sell white bread.
It didn’t offer “jobs, faith and a sense of discipline to the poorest of Oakland’s poor.” It offered extreme racism and a sense of entitlement, along with the protection of being in a well funded and politically correct gang.
And their baked goods were lousy. I actually bought a cinnamon bun there about 25 years ago, when I was an anarchist punk girl wandering the streets. It was stale and nasty. I still remember it.
Uf Da!
Sorry to hear that. Never trust anyone who says he’s doing it for the people... he’s incompetent and/or a crook.
Black communities are always complaining that the police don't do anything to make their neighborhoods better, but this is the problem the officers have to deal with in trying to bring perps to justice. My sister even ran into it when she was a police officer in her South Mississippi town.
Same thing here in Minneapolis.
People in north Minneapolis (a heavily black area of town) say they’re sick of the crime and that the police don’t do anything to stop it.
But when the police do show up and ask questions, they get a whole lot of attitude about how they’re “leaning” on the black folks or they get the “I’z notz seenz nuttin’ officer” line.
A lot of the people in these communities are scared of repreisals by the gangs and other thugs. But there is a way to tell the police what they know without having to be seen talking to a police office in public. In many cases, these people choose to do nothing at all.
And the shootings, drug dealings, assaults, etc keep coming and coming...
Just another street gang. Instead of scarves, they wear bowties.
A gansta’ dies a gangsta’s death. C’ya. Bye.
Black communities are always complaining that the police don’t do anything to make their neighborhoods better, but this is the problem the officers have to deal with in trying to bring perps to justice. My sister even ran into it when she was a police officer in her South Mississippi town.””
60 Minutes did a segment on this this summer. Anderson Cooper interviewed a group of black kids. Over and over their central theme was that they would NOT tell the truth about any crime committed, even and most often, MURDER.
They cry that the cops don’t help them, but they absolutely refuse to help the cops. They re-create this scenario each and every day in the black communities. Never going to change until they realize they are the victims and a great part of the problem for not trying to clean up their own back stoop.
RoTf!
It didn’t offer “jobs, faith and a sense of discipline to the poorest of Oakland’s poor.”
That’s just typical poetic license on the part of the journalist. Trying to make it something it wasn’t.
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