Western Resistance

The late Yusuf Bey can only be described as a pious monster. There are few clues in his background to suggest much other than someone who appeared to come from a mundane background. He was born Joseph H. Stevens in Greeneville, Texas in 1935, and moved with his parents to Oakland at the age of 5. He joined the US Air Force at age 17, and after four years he was honourably discharged.

He gained a degree in cosmetology, and ran beauty salons in Oakland Santa Barbara, before opening a bakery in Santa Barbara in 1968 which later became "Your Black Muslim Bakery". He became involved with the Nation of Islam in 1964, and in 1971 moved his bakery to the East Bay. The bakery sold produce free of artificial colorants, with no refined sugar, fats or preservatives.

The years from his honourable discharge from the Air Force to his founding of his bakery are vague. He has written an autobiography, but it does not deal with his darker side. As the San Fransisco Chronicle observes:

Over the years, Bey and his followers had a love-hate relationship with the city: providing work and housing for convicts and running for political office while allegedly entangling themselves in some notorious crimes.

Bey's followers have been accused of assaulting people with whom they had religious or business differences, and such stories have circulated in Oakland for decades.

In 1994, members of the organization allegedly beat an Oakland man with a police officer's heavy-duty flashlight and threatened to kill the white police officers who came to investigate.

Yusuf Bey was virulently antisemitic. He said he did not hate Jews "because they are not not worthy of being hated." He had a weekly cable show running until shortly before his death called True Solutions in which he dispensed his words of wisdom, such as: "White folks look at black people and they hold their purse. Thinking black folks gonna steal. Black folks look at white folks and hold their brain, thinking they gonna steal their mind." (1999) and "Somebody teach you the truth, you say he's teaching hate. Who taught you that? Who taught you that the messenger's teaching is hate teaching? The Caucasian."

Something of Yusuf Bey senior's message of black racial superiority can be found on the website of Your Black Muslim Bakery, whose name, Bey claimed, was suggested to him by Elijah Mohammed, founder of the Nation of Islam. The article is entitled From The Caves to the White House. Initially I just provided an extract, but the link to Your Black Muslim Bakery has ceased to function since this morning, so I then began to reproduce the article in full. It is so long and meandering, I have reverted to the extract:

Some of you Masons, my sons or Muslim sons know exactly what I'm talking about. But it's a secret your not suppose to tell anyone. Let me finish. He went savage and lived in the caves of Europe. EU means hillsides Rope is the rope to bind in. So you see Europe is not the home of the Caucasian. Europe is a prison. They were ran into Europe as a punishment for causing confusion among Black people as their father taught them to do in order to rule. It was 6019 years ago Mousa or Moses came 2000 years later and taught him how to live a respectable life. How to build a home for himself and some of the tricknology that Yacub taught him which was devilishment, telling lies, stealing and how to master the original man. Mousa or Moses was half original, and a prophet, which was predicted by the twenty-three scientist in the year one. 15,019 years ago today according to the time of this writing. Black history doesn't make mockery of anyone, it tells the truth as taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I'm telling you the beginning of the Caucasian and how he came about, and how his history is symbolic to what we must go through and have gone through for the last 400 years. Understand what the Caucasian had to go through. The Caucasion had everything taken from him except his language. He went savage and couldn't even build a house for himself and cook his food. He ate raw meat, slept in caves or tree tops, and reverted to moving on all fours. Before being run from the root of civilization, the Caucasian wore our fine clothes, educated himself with our books, and lived in our homes. The Caucasian was stripped of everything but a loin cloth to hide his shame. Now what does this have to do with Black history you might say.

Your Black Muslim Bakery is a thriving franchise, in an empire which also runs housing, a school, a security firm (!) and retail businesses. Several "heirs" to the wealth of Yisuf Bey have come forward. One "heir", 24 year old Antar Bey, was recently gunned down in a gas station in Oakland on October 25.

The "new pretender" Yusuf Bey IV is now stepping into the limelight as the next heir. He will probably not receive a great penalty if he is found guilty of the recent attacks. What it will do will give him a gangland "credibility". Such tactics may have worked for his father, but despite Yusuf Bey's flaky philosophies and brutal private sides, he at least knew how to curry favour with members of the city's political elite.

Yusuf junior should take care. Akbar Bey, a son of Yusuf senior and previous "heir" sought credibility in the world of gangland crime. A decade ago, high on an opiate, either morphine or heroin, Akbar Bey had an argument with Lavelle Stewart, a drug dealer outside a nightclub on the corner of 50th Street and Shattuck street. Someone noticed $1,200 of drugs had disappeared from Stewart's car. Bey and his associates were arguing about the issue when Stewart pulled out a .357 Magnum. "It's like this." he explained, and fired two rounds into Akbar Bey's chest and two more into his head.