OAKLAND — Ten years ago today, at 7:27 a.m., well-known local reporter Chauncey Bailey was gunned down on an Oakland sidewalk. He died for the First Amendment.

“Prominent journalist shot dead in street,” yelled a headline the next morning in the Oakland Tribune. But the thuggish remnants of Your Black Muslim Bakery — the black empowerment group founded by Yusef Bey that was behind Bailey’s slaying — targeted more than a lone reporter on Aug. 2, 2007. They targeted all of us, and not just journalists.

Everyone’s right to speak freely was assailed that day. It was, truly, “an assault on the American way of life,” one of Bailey’s former editors at the Detroit News said at the time.

The elder Bey’s empire had deteriorated by the time he died while awaiting trial on the first of multiple charges of raping teenage girls under his care. His son Yusef Bey IV, who emerged as the leader of the tattered enterprise in late 2005, ordered the hit on Bailey.

Bey IV and another man, Antoine Mackey, are spending their lives in prison with no chance of parole. The gunman, Devaughndre Broussard is serving a 25-year sentence at a private prison in the Arizona desert south of Phoenix.

They should be forgotten, especially Bey, who sent others to do his killings for him.

Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, should be remembered. He specialized in community news, but he was digging into a story about Bey and the bakery’s financial problems, and for that Bey ordered Broussard and Mackey to “take him out.”

But a decade on, the intersection of 14th and Alice streets, where Broussard, carrying a pistol-grip shotgun ran up to Bailey and fired three times, is bare of any remembrance of the brutal killing. That shouldn’t be.

A memorial to the slain reporter should mark the spot where he died for exercising his First Amendment rights. It need not be much, a plaque in the sidewalk or on a nearby fence that cordons off a U.S. Postal Service Parking lot.

The age where a U.S President calls journalists “enemies of the people;” when some of his supporters sport tee shirts with the words “rope, tree, journalist, some assembly required” printed on the back; when a congressional candidate body slams a reporter for asking a question; is no time to forget the sacrifice Bailey made for trying to inform his readers.

Frankly, a memorial to Bailey should have been erected long ago.

At the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Bailey’s laptop computer sits in a display case near the burned hulk of a car in which reporter Don Bolles died in a firebombing in 1976. Bolles was investigating land deals between Arizona politicians and members of the Mafia when he died.

Luckily, I suppose, the display about reporters who died for their work in fairly recent U.S. history stops there. But it is foolish to think its expansion will never come.

A group of us formed the Chauncey Bailey Project a decade ago to finish Bailey’s work on the Beys, modeled on the collaborative group of journalists who formed the Arizona Project that picked up Bolles work on the dirty land transactions.

The Bailey Project also exposed flaws in the investigation that finally, after nearly two years, resulted in charges against Bey and Mackey.

That, in its own way, was a living memorial to Bailey.

Now is the time for a permanent one.

The city of Oakland as a political entity should not be involved other than allowing a memorial to be placed at the murder scene. (No self-respecting reporter should want to be memorialized by a government he or she covered.)

No, any public memorial to a reporter slain for practicing the constitutionally enshrined right of Free Speech should come from colleagues and the public. What do you say, people?

It’s time.