That’s not to say prison is easy for Ivan, and the first time he speaks to a new batch of interns for his nonprofit, he implores them to think beyond making prison a better place.
“A prison is an inhumane place, and nothing can alter the existing structure enough to change that,” he said to a group of UC Irvine students. “Please. Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”
“We Don’t Play with Black Kids”
Ivan grew up in Wewoka, Oklahoma, a small farm town in Seminole territory about an hour east of Oklahoma City. The town was established in 1849 as a Black Seminole settlement at a time when most Indigenous people were getting displaced and pushed west. Wewoka’s foundation as a haven for Black Indigenous people was solidified by generations of families who stayed in the area and raised their families there. When Ivan was growing up, it was an almost entirely Black neighborhood, surrounded by almost entirely white suburbs. Ivan didn’t think about race until he started attending a local elementary school with kids from the white part of town.
“I remember this white kid saying, ‘Hey, we don’t play with Black kids,’ and I was just like, ‘Okay, what’s a Black kid?’”
Like past revolutionaries—George Jackson, Marcus Garvey, and others—Ivan became radicalized starting with these early feelings of otherness. In a letter to Bantam Books editor Greg Armstrong, Jackson described it thusly:
We played and fought on the corner sidewalks bordering the school. “They” had a large grass-and-tree-studded garden with an eight-foot wrought-iron fence bordering it (to keep us out, since it never seemed to keep any of them in when they chose to leave).7
This practice of othering, as coined by UC Berkeley’s john a. powell, may seem remote to some readers, but it is a common experience among most people.
“When we pretend we’re not connected, we’re in the process of othering,” said powell—who spells his name with lowercase letters to be “part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify”—at a keynote address for Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, where he serves as director. “We’re in the process of denying not only someone’s humanity, but our own humanity, and denying our connectedness.”8
Ivan felt disconnected from his peers both physically and emotionally. He lived very distinctly on the other side of the tracks from his white classmates. His teachers used racial slurs, and the more he defied them, the more escalated the conflict between himself and authority figures became.
“It started to fester in me, not only as a distrust of society but also as an anger that kept me constantly in the principal’s office,” Ivan said. “I’m getting sent to the office as early as the second and third grade for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and I’m like, ‘How am I gonna go pledge allegiance to the flag when my teacher’s calling me a n——?’”
Ivan chronicled glimpses of his childhood in his book, Mayhem, Murder & Magnificence: A Memoir, one of four he self-published during his incarceration. In his reflections, his interpersonal experiences as a child become increasingly infused by race, as the adults in his life provide him with different ways to interpret his place in society as a young Black man. His teachers firmly placed him on the bottom rung of a racial hierarchy Ivan wasn’t even aware of until he entered school. His grandfather instilled in him a deep mistrust of white people, a belief system rooted in the experience of being disowned by Ivan’s great-grandmother, a Native American, on account of the “Negro blood” he inherited from Ivan’s great-grandfather. Ivan’s grandmother, on the other hand, “accepted her place” in the racial hierarchy, according to her grandson’s memoir, earning a low but steady income cleaning houses with a “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” disposition that harkened from another time.
These mixed messages around racial identity from his family and teachers manifested in Ivan a complex mentality that would ultimately shape his future.
“The mannish boy would quickly grow into a reserved man,” Ivan wrote. “And yet, before he could accomplish anything, there was the instability, impulsiveness, and lack of self-esteem he would have to encounter and conquer.”9
Ivan’s aunt Betty remembers a sweet and smart child who had to grow up quickly. Ivan’s father was murdered when he was three. Ivan’s mother remarried and quickly became overwhelmed with stepchildren and a worsening drug addiction. His grandparents, who raised Ivan and his sisters, grew infirm by the time he was in high school. Ivan, Aunt Betty said, became a “mother hen” to his sisters and increasingly ill grandparents. He started earning money as a landscaper when he was ten years old, but it was grueling work. When a friend told him he could make $40 in a single night, he was easily persuaded to trade in his gardening tools.
It was 1987, and Ivan was thirteen. A man named Preston Reese had opened up the first crack house in the neighborhood. With the US crack epidemic in full swing, and inner-city Black communities acutely impacted by it, Reese’s establishment quickly became a hotspot. He offered to pay Ivan and his friend to act as lookouts. As the boys proved themselves trustworthy, they were given small amounts of crack to sell to local users. Always a student, Ivan learned the mechanics of the crack trade—manufacturing, distribution, and security—and by the time he was twenty he was trafficking drugs between Oklahoma and California.
Ivan describes his first prison sentence as an almost natural consequence of being a young Black man swept up in the 1980s crack boom. Studies have shown that violence escalated quickly in communities shortly after the crack trade entered; the murder rate of young Black males doubled soon after the drug came on scene. Although the majority of young Black men were not directly involved in the crack market, an increased presence of guns and profit wars spread like a virus in these communities, putting residents in one of two categories: participants or collateral damage.10 As a participant, Ivan said, he lived by a strict code of loyalty and a kill-or-be-killed mentality.
“I don’t want to make excuses and put it all off on race, but it definitely plays a factor,” Ivan told me. “As a young Black man, I didn’t have people telling me I could conquer the world, that I could go out there and be anything I wanted it to be. So we believed that drug dealing or robbery was the way, and that was constantly reinforced by the need to get by any means necessary. And necessity knows no law.”
In 1995 a friend he trusted and relied on broke into Ivan’s family home. His world was destabilized and his protective nature went into overdrive, with his wife, mother, and sisters all living under the roof of the property. Ivan confronted the man the following week at a party, and when the meeting got heated, Ivan shot and killed him. After Ivan’s trial ended in a hung jury, he pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter and spent the next four years in Oklahoma’s prison system, two in the Seminole County Jail and two at Cimarron City Correctional Facility. When he was paroled in 1998, he got as far from Oklahoma as he could, determined to start over fresh in California.
Agency
Ivan founded United Black Family Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit organization, from a California maximum security cell in 2014. It was a year after he completed the 300-plus-page manuscript for his first book, Domestic Genocide: The Institutionalization of Society, a labor of love typed up on a banged-up computer—the kind that used floppy disks—that he was allowed to access for one hour each day. He had the disk smuggled out and the book published in 2013. Then he was thrown into the security housing unit.
When Ivan emerged, his world had become something of a blank canvas. The department had transferred him to Salinas Valley State Prison, some 200 miles from his previous facility in Sacramento. In the supermax sector, contraband phones were going at a rate far beyond Ivan’s means at the time, so web surfing and social networking were off the table. His magnum opus completed and in print, he began seeking a new outlet for his creative energy. One day his cellie walked in with a massive hardcover book detailing how to start a nonprofit, and Ivan realized his next venture had just found him.
He proceeded to learn about documentation, the required governance structure, and associated fees of filing for a 501(c)(3). He drew up articles of incorporation and sought out his three initial directors, one of the requirements for establishing a nonprofit. He started with people close to him on the outside, making phone calls to two friends from Oakland and his cousin Darryl.
Darryl was skeptical. The boys had grown up together in Oklahoma, and Darryl’s memories of Ivan were stained with his criminal activities and interactions with law enforcement. His initial reaction to Ivan’s proposal that Darryl serve as a director for the nonprofit was, according to Ivan, “C’mon, cuz. You’ve been in so much shit, and you want me to sign up with you on some nonprofit so I end up in the pen, too?” It may not have been the answer he wanted, but Ivan had come to terms with the man he presented to the world prior to his incarceration by way of the self-reflection he made in Domestic Genocide. So he sent Darryl a copy. Soon afterward, the cousins reconnected on the phone.
“He said, ‘You sure have changed, ain’t you?’” Ivan recalled. “He was still hesitant to get caught up in anything so I said, ‘Cuz, you’ve known me my whole life and you know I’ve always been a man of my word. If you sign on, you have my word that everything I do from here on out is on the level.’”
Ivan sent directorial forms to the two men in Oakland and Darryl, who aggregated the forms, the documents of incorporation Ivan had completed, and the $40 filing fee, and sent it to Oklahoma’s secretary of state. The department responded with additional information that was needed to complete the application, as well as a copy of the state penal code that bars any incarcerated person from holding an executive role at a nonprofit. Ivan was ready for this final obstacle: Darryl had agreed to act as his power of attorney.
Since then, the organization has taken on projects such as funding a local youth basketball team in Oklahoma and publishing works by incarcerated authors. Ivan’s community-based revolution is detailed in grant letters for the nonprofit’s REBUILD program, an acronym for Reinvest in Every Black and Underserved Institution to Liberate and Diversify. (Gotta love nonprofits and their acronyms.) The program is designed to engage community members in neighborhood revitalization projects to disrupt the poverty-to-prison and school-to-prison pipelines. Grant documents for REBUILD detail how homes, schools, and neighborhood amenities will be reconstructed, updated, and developed by the people who will live, learn, and work in the area—thereby manifesting an investment in maintaining its safety and integrity.
“A lot of criminal justice nonprofits are catching the problem [of mass incarceration] by the tail, dealing with a lot of reform issues for people already in prison,” Ivan explained. “We’re saying, ‘Hold up, let’s address issues on the front end. Let’s have a program that’s working to stop the induction of people going into the prison system, as opposed to working with people once they’re in there or after they come out.’ That’s like focusing efforts on things that are the symptoms, not the root problem.”
It’s a strategy that has been embraced by abolitionist thought leaders like Zach Norris, former executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, who explored the idea of a society without prisons in his book Defund Fear: Safety without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment. “In a comprehensive new system of public safety, we must move from punishment to accountability, from deprivation to resources, from suspicion to relationships, and from isolation to participation,” Norris writes.11
Ivan can attest to the effectiveness of putting blood, sweat, and tears into building a community from personal experience. After paroling to Oakland from Oklahoma, he got a job working in construction. Jerry Brown, who had just won the mayoral race, had proposed a “revitalization” of downtown Oakland, a series of construction projects and an injection of private enterprise that would increase the quality of life for residents and buoy the economy. The plan included 10,000 refurbished residences for the area, earning the project the title the 10K Plan. Ivan became a foreman for one of the development sites, a position that made him feel invested in the look, upkeep, and well-being of the neighborhood. He got to know the tenants who lived there; he carried groceries for elderly residents; he showed up at 4:30 a.m. to sweep trash from the streets.
“Years later, when I’m thinking about putting this organization together, I thought about those memorable moments, of how I was able to connect to that community,” Ivan said. “I was able to take a certain level of pride in the community.”
But the 10K Plan stripped away any hope Ivan and his working-class peers had for becoming a part of the new downtown coterie. The modernized units were priced far above what the average worker living in Oakland could afford, which led to a vast gentrification that pushed many of downtown’s former residents, and certainly the workers who revitalized it, to East Oakland or into tent cities. According to local activists, no affordable housing units would have been built without the organized community protests at that time.12
This result is not unique to Oakland. Most neighborhoods selected for government-funded improvements end up being gentrified, with the original residents pushed farther away from city centers.
“Revitalization does generally occur when a neighborhood becomes attractive to the middle class, but all too often the gentrification that follows does not include strict enforcement of inclusionary zoning principles, and it gradually drives the African American poor out of their now-upgraded neighborhoods and into newly segregated inner-ring suburbs,” writes Rothstein.13
Ivan’s collective participation in developing downtown meant he felt invested, but denial of agency within downtown—the fact that he couldn’t afford to live there—thrust him into a common cycle. He and his coworkers had built the doors that were now closing in their faces. He looked for work, but he’d light up criminal background checks and be rebuffed. He tried something more entrepreneurial, but he lacked the kind of equity he needed as startup capital.
“At one point, I wanted to open an urban clothing store, but the bank told me I needed to put down fifty grand just to get going,” Ivan said. “At that point in my life, I only knew one way to make that kind of money.”
Again, the effects of othering were upon him. As Norris writes, “The less agency you’re able to exercise in your life, because of complex, intractable systems, the more likely you are to embrace the idea of an external enemy you can blame.”14
Ivan blamed the capitalist system seemingly intent on denying him, so he went back to what he saw as the only way he could make ends meet: selling drugs. It hadn’t changed much. The demand was great, the money was ample, and the relationships were still marred with violent undertones. Ivan says one man in particular, William Anderson, repeatedly attacked him and robbed him on several occasions. On July 16, 2000, Ivan was ready to return fire. He shot and killed Anderson and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, a flowery term for death by incarceration.
“So where did it all go wrong,” he’d ponder from his prison cell years later. As he reflected on his experience in Oakland, he began writing the specs for the REBUILD program. He pinpointed the defects of Brown’s 10K Plan that had thrown his life in reverse; he designed the REBUILD neighborhoods to be developed by the people who reside there—and will continue to live there post-revitalization. He thought about access to capital and included training programs that would allow participants to assist in the revitalization while also ensuring they acquired skills to earn a living wage. The parameters for qualifying neighborhoods were high concentrations of dilapidated homes and high incarceration rates, neighborhoods like the one he grew up in.
The pilot REBUILD neighborhood is in the Eastside neighborhood of Oklahoma City, about seventy miles west of Wewoka. Using public databases, student interns have identified 1,200 neglected properties within a fifteen-mile radius. As of autumn 2023, volunteers were planning onboarding processes, holding workshops for community members on basic trade skills like carpentry and plumbing. By creating stability in housing, marketable skills, and a livable wage, the program will interrupt the revolving door of Black and Brown people filing into prison, and abolition is attained by starving the system of bodies.
