“When a 19 year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the U.S. in 30 years—the question was: Why? Killing the Messenger… explores one of the most blatant attacks on the 1st Amendment and free speech in American history and the… cult that carried it out…Yusuf Bey… created a radical religion of bloodshed and fear…through a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, beating and raping dozens of women… and fathering more than 40 children… [while] the police looked the other way as his violent soldiers ruled the streets. [culminating] in a journalist’s murder.”
-- Excerpted from the inside cover of the book’s dust jacket

“The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is the universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America... Despite the obvious similarities between Jesus’ death on a cross and the death of thousands of black men and women strung up to die on a lamppost or a tree, relatively few people… have explored the symbolic connections. Yet, I believe this is a challenge we must face. What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society… [Those] who want to understand the true meaning of the American experience need to remember lynching. To forget this atrocity leaves us with a fraudulent perspective of this society and of the meaning of the Christian gospel for this nation.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. xiii-xiv)