UC Berkeley graduate fellowship in Chauncey Bailey’s honor solicits donations
By Mary Fricker
The Chauncey Bailey Project
The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is soliciting donations for a graduate fellowship in honor of Chauncey Bailey.
“We want to honor his legacy this way and are eager to see the Chauncey Bailey Fellowships figure prominently on the resumes of the prize-winning reporters of tomorrow,” said Edward Wasserman, dean at the school of journalism.
The fellowship was established in 2012 by Alan Mutter, a lecturer at the journalism school, who kicked off the campaign with a $10,000 donation. UC Berkeley has added $10,000. The goal is at least $100,000, Wasserman said.
The graduate fellowship will be awarded to students who “demonstrate the potential for leadership in promoting cross-cultural understanding, or who seek to use journalism to shed light on racial and ethnic injustice.”
From the journalism school website:
The Chauncey Bailey Graduate Fellowship, established in 2012 by J-School lecturer Alan Mutter, is named for Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr., the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, who was murdered on Aug. 2, 2007, while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. His murder, at 57, was the most recent killing of a U.S. journalist since 1993, and one of the most prominent since the 1985 murder of Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu by Taiwanese intelligence agents, and the 1976 car-bombing death of Don Bolles.
Recipients will be students who demonstrate the potential for leadership in promoting cross-cultural understanding, or who seek to use journalism to shed light on racial and ethnic injustice.
For more information, see the award-winning documentary “A Late Day in Oakland,” directed by J-School alum Zachary Stauffer (‘08); Killing the Messenger, by J-School lecturer Thomas Peele, who called Bailey’s murder “one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment and free speech in American history,” and The Chauncey Bailey Project, an award-winning investigative project by reporters and editors from across the Bay Area who knew him. The project proved their motto “You can’t kill a story by killing a journalist.”