Kevin Chavous is not an expert fiction writer, and he knows it. In fact, he would be the first person to tell you. "I've never viewed myself as a creative guy," the former D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate told me over coffee at the Georgetown Inn in December.
“I was able to just let my imagination go and not worry about the consequences,” Chavous, 62, told me with a hearty laugh. When we met, he was dressed in classic politician weekend wear: crisp blue-and-white striped collared shirt, navy sport coat and reading glasses tucked in his left breast pocket. He’s tall — 6-foot-3 — and still carries himself like a glad-handing legislator, though he’s worked in the private sector since 2005. (He’s now a president at K12 Inc., a curriculum company that offers virtual learning options.)
So why is a politician turned executive spending his free time writing about conspiracy theories? Perhaps because we’re living in a time when, more and more, unfounded conjecture is starting to resemble reality.
Chavous’s book is based in part on a conspiracy theory — also called the Plan — that gained traction in Washington in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to this theory, white people were trying to “take back” Washington from black residents by pushing urban renewal and real estate development projects that made the city increasingly unaffordable to low-income minorities.
Derek Musgrove, a history professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the author of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital,” notes that black communities across the country have their own versions of the Plan. “Concerns about the white power structure doing things that hurt [black people] in a lot of cases come true,” he says. Indeed, the fears that inspired the Plan seem to have become reality: The District lost its majority-black status in 2015, thanks in part to an influx of affluent millennials and empty-nesters, which in turn has driven up housing prices.
Chavous’s career in local politics began in a different era. He was elected to the D.C. Council in 1992 to represent Ward 7, a primarily low-income and African American area of the city. Over the next dozen years he focused on enacting fiscally conservative financial reform and supporting the charter-school movement. He saw the latter as providing an alternative to the city’s struggling public school system, which many wealthy white residents bypassed by placing their children in elite private schools.
However, many of his constituents ultimately grew frustrated with what they saw as his disinterest in their day-to-day concerns. “Although he’s an expert at the art of campaign spouting, smiling, touching, flirting, Chavous is all tease and chase,” Jonetta Rose Barras wrote for the Washington City Paper in 1998. “Once he’s captured the prize, he loses interest. His enthusiasm wanes. He disappoints.”
“I always felt confined,” Chavous said when asked about his council tenure. “It was hard for me to push for a lot of things because I represented a ward that had so many needs.” While some of his at-large colleagues focused on their policy agendas, Chavous said he was attending funerals for teenagers killed by drug violence and fielding calls from constituents stuck in prison. When he lost his council seat to Vincent Gray in 2004 and decided to step back from the political world, he didn’t shed a tear, he recalls.
Some of the characters in “The Plan” reflect Chavous’s lingering feelings about his stint in politics. He wrote most of the politicians to be bumbling pawns or racist conspirators, incapable of resisting deals with wealthy, egotistical businessmen. “Remember, it’s fiction,” Chavous said with a wink, “but the thing is, there are really those crazies that make it through the net. I know some.”
He decided to write “The Plan” after watching white-supremacist groups and right-wing conspiracy theories gain traction during the 2016 presidential election. Anita Waters, a retired history and anthropology professor at Denison University with a specialty in conspiracy theories and African American political culture, notes that conspiracy theories provide people — black or white, conservative or liberal — with a way to make sense of their social misfortunes and place blame on a concrete entity. That’s exactly what happens in “The Plan”: Chavous’s frustrations with the public school system come to life in the form of a conspiracy to kill black children through public school lunches.
Despite its author’s D.C. bona fides, “The Plan” has garnered little response thus far. The book has nine reviews on Amazon.com (Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post), and Chavous said he’s sold about a thousand copies. At a book event in Atlanta last winter, a friend told Chavous he’d rate the book a C-plus. “At least it wasn’t a D,” he said to me, before bending over in a big laugh.
Chavous seems to be genuinely unaffected by the criticism. He’s particularly proud of the action sequences he wrote — and proud that he granted himself the freedom to publicly try something new. He’s even working on a follow-up novel (working title: “The Fund”); ultimately, he hopes to turn the Jackson Lowery series into a trilogy. The next book, he told me, “is going to be fun, and it’s going to be written better. I get excited just thinking about it.”
Mikaela Lefrak is the arts and culture reporter at WAMU-FM (88.5).