Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assa

Title: Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist
Author: Peele, Thomas

Description: An award-winning investigative reporter explores the origins and history of the Black Muslim movement, providing complementary coverage of con-man founder Elijah Muhammad and the 2007 murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey by a zealous teen cult member. 30,000 first printing.

An investigative reporter explores the origins and history of the Black Muslim movement, the rise of a small but violent Black Muslim cult in Oakland, and the 2007 murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey by a teenage member of the cult.

When a nineteen-year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Oakland newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the United States in thirty years—the question was, Why? “I just wanted to be a good soldier, a strong soldier,” the killer told police.   A strong soldier for whom?

Killing the Messenger is a searing work of narrative nonfiction that explores one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment and free speech in American history and the small Black Muslim cult that carried it out. Award-winning investigative reporter Thomas Peele examines the Black Muslim movement from its founding in the early twentieth century by a con man who claimed to be God, to the height of power of the movement's leading figure, Elijah Muhammad, to how the great-grandson of Texas slaves reinvented himself as a Muslim leader in Oakland and built the violent cult that the young gunman eventually joined. Peele delves into how charlatans exploited poor African Americans with tales from a religion they falsely claimed was Islam and the years of bloodshed that followed, from a human sacrifice in Detroit to police shootings of unarmed Muslims to the horrible backlash of racism known as the “zebra murders,” and finally to the brazen killing of Chauncey Bailey to stop him from publishing a newspaper story. 
 
Peele establishes direct lines between the violent Black Muslim organization run by Yusuf Bey in Oakland and the evangelicalism of the early prophets and messengers of the Nation of Islam.  Exposing the roots of the faith, Peele examines its forerunner, the Moorish Science Temple of America, which in the 1920s and '30s preached to migrants from the South living in Chicago and Detroit ghettos that blacks were the world's master race, tricked into slavery by white devils. In spite of the fantastical claims and hatred at its core, the Nation of I

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