Although horrific to contemplate, a third-grade teacher placing Chris Chatmon’s desk in the coat closet for five weeks turned into a blessing for Black youths in Oakland and the broader Bay Area.
Four decades later at age 57, the founder/CEO of Kingmakers of Oakland, a community-focused organization that includes a youth-based record label, is able to reflect on the ordeal with his teacher.
“She didn’t know how to deal with my spirited energy,” Chatmon says. “She’d close the door. Traumatized, what saved me was I found a poem by Langston Hughes, Dreams. It says, ‘Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.‘ I realized she was trying to break my wings, so I just began singing. Music and poetry gave me perspective and a safe space, a friend. The arts became my truth.”
Additional negative experiences in K-12 public schools became the engine driving his life’s work and passions.
The most audible recent manifestation of Chatmon’s unbounded energy is Kingmakers Music’s “Black Love,” a 2024 album masterminded by Oakland MC and producer Zo1. The 16-track record brings contributions from multiple (mostly) Bay Area-based musicians to collectively produce an album infused with top-tier electronic instrumentation and live music that stretches the parameters of traditional hip-hop and rap. The sound is deep mobb, with rich melodies that float above the slow, heavy bass lines and lyrics expounding on concepts of love.
In many ways, the new album is a continuation of the label’s prior releases, such as the Revolution Remix. The album offered content responding to the pandemic, racism and the protest movement that was taken up worldwide in 2020 after shootings by police of multiple unarmed Black people in the United States. In addition to producing and presenting Kingmakers’ music, KOO offers extensive youth activities, academic programs, an innovation lab, in-school partnering services focused on family and community engagement, youth leadership, Black male teacher recruitment, responsive curriculums, equitable education policies, and more.
Chatmon and his wife of 28 years, LaShawn, have three adult sons who play significant roles in KOO, making it in that respect, a family operation. His journey to careers in education and youth development began in Daly City, where he was born. Chatmon raised his kids in Oakland, where he currently resides. He has been a physical education and social studies teacher, public school principal, earned his masters in education with a full scholarship to Brown University in Rhode Island, and served as Executive Director of the African American Male Achievement for the Oakland Unified School district.
“I do what I do in my professional life because of realizing that teacher was trying to break my wings” he says. “My work is shaped by negative experiences I had in public school — corporal punishment, bus bans. People may control my physical body and confine my spaces, but my wholeness and happiness is in art. It was the intrinsic motivation of being told in high school I should be at the alternative high school. I realized I’m beautiful and brilliant and want to curate spaces where young Black and brown people can supercharge their skills with transformative teachers and supportive classrooms.”
Chatmon moved into the nonprofit sector to access increased funding and create broader academic structures for supporting youths. “KOO became about even more than music; we ascend through film and television production, writing, fashion desing, and all the arts. Where I’m at now is accumulating enough infrastructure for the next generation to access a world class recording studio, not ask for permission to lead, get to camps in nature that the outdoors gave me every summer. While I was in school, I was a wilted flower. At summer camp, I was a powerful Redwood tree.”
Motivation flows equally from victories and challenges. “I met my board co-chair, Romero Wesson, when he was in sixth grade and his brother had just been murdered. Being able to offer a pathway for him to take out his crown and rock it, not fall victim to the streets and to now be the co-chair of a $7 million organization that allows him to travel and influence youth locally and globally — is everything.”
Chatmon says the challenge is the same as what he experienced in the 1970s and ’80s. “What is prevalent now more than ever with this new administration is the continued assault on young Black minds, bodies and spirits. They’re disproportionately suspended, expelled, referred to special education. Such an audacious assault on the work we’re trying to do — that’s the biggest rock. Even the words we use makes us vulnerable to our proposals getting pulled, gone. I remind myself our ancestors dealt far more with far less. Faith and community will help us weather the storm and rise like a Phoenix.”
On the newest album he highlights two songs that speak explicitly and forcefully to KOO’s purpose. The song “Black Love” embodies the thing he says has powered Black people out of revolutions and through dark periods in American history.
“Everyone who wrote that song is under age 25,” Chatmon says. “For me, it’s internalized the love of self, brother, sister, family and community and it’s our ethos. With love, we can move through conflict and understand differences. Through the medium of hip-hop and rap, these young kings write about and actualize what we work at achieving.”
The second song is “Ubuntu” and is based on ideas of community and humanity. Chatmon says indigenous cultures long ago took the South African word and brought the “we” to the definition of success. “Young people bring present day context to their ideas of community and put it out in music, in a way almost independent of language.”
Presented the landscape of an ideal world minus financial, personnel, or other constraints on his vision, Chatmon says what he would most count as a victory would be acquisition of 200 acres of land in Mendocino County.
“That would allow us to get out of this built, urban environment to do a healing, multicultural, intergenerational, cross-functional camp,” he explains. “We’d fish, do arts and crafts, sit around the campfire and share stories. We’re blessed to be close to beautiful spaces that afford opportunity to see the humanity in all of us. We have the people power. Now, we just need capital and people with the will to build it.”
Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.