Editor killed during his investigation becomes one of George Polk Awards winners

The editor of The Oakland Post, a weekly journal for black readers, became one of the winners of George Polk Awards for 2007. Chauncey W. Bailey Jr., 57, was killed on August 2 as he investigated Your Black Muslim Bakery, a criminal business linked to kidnappings, rapes and killings. Other awards went to reporters investigating atrocities in Myanmar and Iraq, the disastrous environmental situation in China and corruption in the USA.

The George Polk Awards are a series of American journalism awards issued annually by Long Island University in Brooklyn. They were established in 1949 to remember George Polk, a CBS correspondent slain covering the Greek civil war. They are awarded in categories, which change annually and may include foreign, radio, economic, national, internet reporting, photojournalism, magazine, state reporting, etc.

Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr. (1949 – August 2, 2007) was an American journalist, renowned for his work primarily on issues of the African-American community. He served as editor-in-chief of the five San Francisco Bay Area Post newspapers from June 2007 until his shooting death on August 2, 2007. His 37-year career in journalism included lengthy periods as a reporter at the Detroit News and the Oakland Tribune.

Bailey was working on a story about the finances of Your Black Muslim Bakery, involving its pending bankruptcy.

After the shooting the Post publisher Paul Cobb revealed on television that, prior to Bailey's killing, Cobb had withheld from publication a story that Bailey had written earlier, saying only that it was about "things like" what happened to Bailey. He later stated that the police had asked him not to reveal anything about the matter. On August 6, 2007 a former employee of the bakery, Ali Saleem Bey, who is not a relative but who adopted the Bey name, revealed that he was Bailey's source for the withheld story, which the Post had decided was not ready for publication. Bailey had asked Bey to give him the story since at least the prior two years.

On the morning of August 2, 2007, Bailey set out on his usual walk. Unknown to him, Devaughndre Broussard, a 19-year-old handyman at Your Black Muslim Bakery, who was on probation for a San Francisco robbery conviction, had found out where Bailey lived. Broussard had worked at the bakery as a handyman and cook between August 2006 and March 2007, before leaving to find other work. He was rehired at the bakery early in July 2007.

As he was walking from home to work, Bailey was shot dead around 7:30 a.m. on 14th Street near Alice Street in Oakland, California, in what police described as "an assassination". Witnesses said the single gunman wearing dark clothing and a ski mask approached Bailey and fired at least three rounds from a shotgun, hitting Bailey at least once in the chest, then ran away on foot to a waiting van and drove off.