This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Innovations in Community Ownership
In August 2023, after 67 years of incarceration, Ruchell “Cinqué” Magee emerged from the California Medical Facility, Vacaville, in Northern California, at last a free man. His cousin Barbara Stewart and the Southern California–based Starting Over Inc.—a service provider and advocacy group for formerly incarcerated community members—were waiting outside to take him home.
Considered by many the longest-held political prisoner in the United States, Magee did not get to enjoy his freedom for long; he lived for only another three months before passing.
A lesser-known figure of the Black liberation movement, Magee was perhaps best known for being one of the first people “to link the prison system to slavery (the first, according to political activist Angela Davis) when he declared, “Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”
“Many people don’t think of him as a hero, but to many of us, he is,” says Vonya Quarles, Starting Over’s co-founder and executive director. “His spirit was an inspiration for what we are doing now.”
To honor Magee’s legacy, Starting Over Inc. is establishing the Ruchell “Cinqué” Magee Community Land Trust, in order to provide an opportunity for returning community members—as well as anyone who’s been harmed by the criminal justice system—to become homeowners, and in turn, “opportunities for wealth development and stability,” says Quarles.
A Needed Housing Focus
According to a 2021 report from the Council of State Governments Justice Center, up to 39 percent of people entering parole from California prisons report “moderate or high rental instability.” California does not require incarcerated folks to have a place to live upon release, which may account for why as much as 70 percent of people experiencing homelessness in the state have a history of incarceration, according to the Western Center on Law & Poverty.
Reentry programming is significantly less funded in the U.S. than mass incarceration is, and available housing options for people returning from prison have historically replicated carceral settings, but providers have begun to reimagine what is possible in sheltering this community.
Starting Over supports returning community members with transitional housing and reentry services, but the trust will go one step further. Quarles says there will be a process for readying community members for ownership. “We believe the solution is to create safe spaces of belonging and opportunity.”
As far as she knows, it will be the first community land trust (CLT) of its kind to serve this community.
“Deciding to name the land trust [after] Ruchell was intentional,” says Quarles. “He is a great example of how the system functions.”
Magee’s Story
Magee was born in 1939 in the Jim Crow South, and at the age of 16—in August 1955, the same month and year that 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman—Magee was similarly charged with attempted rape of 22-year-old married white woman. He was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor at Louisiana’s infamous “Angola” prison, a former slave plantation, and became its youngest inmate. After eight years, in 1963, Magee was released, but his family land had been confiscated, and he was ordered to leave for Los Angeles for parole. Six months later, Magee was arrested in a dispute over a $10 bag of marijuana.
In prison Magee became politicized and borrowed the name “Cinqué” from the enslaved African who led the 1839 rebellion on the slave ship La Amistad. In 1970, for his involvement in the Marin County Courthouse Rebellion—in which he took up arms for a hostage swap, also intending to expose on a radio news station the racism of California’s penal system—Magee also borrowed inspiration from the Amistad Africans’ legal defense for his own, stating that he had a right to resist unlawful slavery, just as former U.S. president John Quincy Adams had argued on behalf of the first Cinqué.
A jury found him not guilty of murder charges, but deadlocked over whether to find him guilty of kidnapping charges and a mistrial was declared. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to life, though he regretted the plea.
Magee was released in 2023 under California’s compassionate release law, which had passed the year prior. He was 84 years old.
“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery,” Magee is quoted as saying. “This cause will benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”
“People don’t know his name, and they don’t know what he stood for, like he’s a forgotten figure among Black political prisoners in history,” says Emma Li, Starting Over Inc.’s communications specialist and secretary of the CLT board. “We’re so excited to be carrying on Ruchell’s legacy in this way and keeping his name going.”
A Vision of Belonging and Wealth-Building
Fidel Chagolla, an organizer for Starting Over and a co-chair of the CLT board alongside Quarles, says that the main objective of the trust is to help returning community members build their lives over the long term. While Starting Over Inc. provides transitional housing, Chagolla says that the trust will meet a community need for sustainable economic prosperity.
“Ruchell worked for probably 50 years in there and had nothing to show for it—no Social Security benefits, no unemployment options, nothing,” says Chagolla. “We thought that we [could] create something that would help people like Ruchell be able to build and create the kind of wealth their families deserve.”
We thought that we [could] create something that would help people like Ruchell be able to build and create the kind of wealth their families deserve.”
Fidel Chagolla, co-chair of the community land trust
What that wealth-generation will look like is still on the drawing board: The campaign for the CLT launched in November of last year and is still fundraising as the organization searches for an appropriate parcel of land—about 20 acres, says Quarles—in California’s San Bernardino or Riverside counties. Whether housing will take the form of apartments or independent houses is still to be determined. The board has its ideas, but ultimately, Chagolla and Quarles say, the vision for the CLT will be largely sculpted by Starting Over Inc.’s Community Advisory Board, which is composed of people returning from incarceration and other system-affected community members—the very people the CLT is intended to reach.
Along with housing, “our vision includes community gardens, services, revenue-generating businesses—all kinds of stuff that could happen there,” says Quarles, though she adds that they are staying open to the needs of the folks they will be serving.
So far, says Chagolla, “A lot of the conversations have mentioned having opportunities and a place where they belong, and feel like they belong.”
Meeting the Moment
Perhaps a CLT focused on housing for the formerly incarcerated is right on time in meeting the community’s needs.
Last month, President Trump signed two executive orders that allow local and state governments to remove unhoused people from streets and encampments and forcibly transfer them into rehabilitation or treatment centers, an action condemned by the National Coalition for the Homeless as “fundamentally” misrepresenting homelessness “as a criminal issue rather than a societal challenge requiring compassionate and systemic solutions.”
Advocates fear that returning community members could be recriminalized for lacking housing as the administration pushes to further criminalize and institutionalize the unhoused.
“This is just one CLT, and perhaps the first specifically for justice involved people, but we believe it will not be the last,” says Quarles. “We cannot truly end homelessness until we address the housing needs of justice-involved community members. We can be part of the solution, or we can all continue to maintain an underclass of formerly incarcerated people.”
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This was an amazing article. I am currently transitioning out of prison after a 25 year sentence. A group of current and formerly incarcerated men are building a similar model up in Washington State. I signed up for the newsletter and will look for more on this model. Thank you so much for bringing attention to this critical issue.
Nick Hacheney
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-hacheney-9a645439b/